After successfully troubleshooting the game to get past the intro mission without crashing, I decided to save the game. I know that the game allows for saves after each mission.

So I saved the game after the intro mission and exited to my desktop.

Once I opened up the game again, the save was gone, and I was back to doing the intro mission again.


Any tips?

You should provide more information about your system (OS, hardware, etc.) in order to get help.

I suspect a permission-related issue: the game couldn't be able to write the save game data on disk.
What did you do to prevent the game from crashing? Do you use Galaxy or not?

It seems that I found the solution by trial and error.

As a heads up, I run the game on an about a year old non-gaming laptop running Windows 10.

At first, I had problems just getting past the first intro mission: every time I would press enter after the newspaper screen, the game would crash.

The first clue I found was on this forum: someone had said to not use the Hotfix patch, so that's what I did.

I found the second clue on PCGamingWiki's page for Hitman Blood Money. It said to try to do two things:

1. run the game's config tool and set its shader from 3 to 2.
2. go through the same config tool and check override SLI AND check enable SLI (even if you didn't have the capacity to utilize it.)

This is what got me past the intro mission, but once I did that and I saved, even though the save screen said that the save was successful, long behold when I came back after exiting the game, I was back at the intro mission again.

So out of sheer curiosity, I unchecked the SLI override and unchecked enable SLI, BUT I left the shader at 2.
After all, I didn't have a card capable to utilize SLI in the first place.

This combination:
1. Not Hotfixing the game
AND
2. Running the config tool and bringing down the shader from 3 to 2

is what got me past the intro mission and allowed me to save after completing a mission.

Hope this information helps anyone with this problem!