Hi all,
Had some of the same freezing/crashing to desktop when getting to the main menu of Warcraft II BNE (mainly with the dx version though).
Turns out it was MSI Afterburner, or rather the Rivatuner bundled with it. Either close both programs (Afterburner and Rivatuner) OR add the exe files to Rivatuner, select each exe and turn Application detection level to None (and not be able to use On-Screen Display).

Hope this helps some people :)

A bit better way.
Uninstall both. Download RivaTuner RTSS from its official download page.
It is NOT related to MSI. Both MSI and RTSS as package with MSI bring issues.

Still no autoload for RTSS. Launch in only when you need its overlay in game (incl non appeared ovelay but injected FPS limiter, which one technically use overlay as injector).

I searched for solution - War2 BNE starts to be very slow after changing GPU to RX 7900. Thanks for pointing that Riva/Afterburner is slowing down the game.