I've had some crashing issues with the game in previous levels (the beginning of the Research level in particular) but nothing this bad. There's no way around it; the game always crashes just about a few seconds to a minute into the first outdoor section (second checkpoint) of the Treehouse area. I still get an image, but nothing moves and keyboard and mouse input are pretty much entirely dead. The only reaction I've been able to get from the computer is if I hold down Ctrl-Alt-Del for a long time, the screen goes black except for the regular mouse pointer, which I can move. I still can't do anything in this case, though, so the problem always requires a hard reboot. The oddities in the background noise when the game crashes made me think initially that it might be a sound driver problem: the general background noise like birds and wind and such stay playing normally, but any incidental sounds like gunfire or the buggy that drives by at the very beginning of the level get "stuck" and start looping only a tiny segment of the sound over and over. However, I tried to update my drivers and found that I already had the latest drivers for my sound system.

My computer is a Dell Inspiron 1720 notebook. Here are my specs:
Intel Core 2 Duo T5250 1.5 GHz each (3 GHz total)
2 GB RAM
nVidia GeForce 8600M GT
Windows Vista 32-bit
Patch 1.33

My SigmaTel High Definition Audio Codec has worked fine in the past for other games (I can run Oblivion, Half-Life 2 all the way up to Episode Two, etc. no problem, for example).
I'm guessing that the problem lies in my dual-core processor, but I don't know how to fix it. I tried setting Far Cry's affinity to CPU 0 only, but that didn't help at all. I also tried XP and 2000 compatibility mode, running the program as an administrator, and turning all the settings down as low as they'll go (I don't believe it's a graphics problem, but you never know).

It just got worse; I tried starting a fresh file to see if my checkpoints were corrupted or something, but now the game crashes right out of the starting gate. I can get through maybe 3 or 4 seconds before the whole thing freezes entirely and I have to hard reboot again.