Tried everything, game is still not ...

Hey, just recently purchased this game after playing it at a cousins house -- it was a blast! The problem I seem to have is some sort of crash I guess?

I can boot up the game, enter the main menu, configure game settings, and even choose the first level. Once the loading screen - the one showing you the games controls - tells you to, "Press any button to contiue." the beginning cutscene loads up and plays.

Now, when I skip the (beginning) cutscene, the game just goes back to my desktop. When I let the cutscene play out, it gets all the way to the end *spoilers* "We're all doomed" and all that jazz ; the game ostensibly begins to load. Once again though, the game takes me straight back to my desktop.

Ooh! almost forgot. I have also verified my game cache and defragmented my files, but to no avail.  After, I created a user.cfg file to lower my framerate and put the game in windowed mode.   That ended up not help preventing the game from crashing.

I've only posted this message because I've read through most others of these posts and haven't found anyone with these same issues. Really enjoy this game and it's unfortunate that this is happening. Hopefully this is just a bug that can be patched. Either way, I still hope for a reply of some sort!