I'm not familiar with XNA so I don't know where I can find an error log like the one Black Knight gave above. If you can tell me where to find it I'll locate for you in case it contains some useful info (but looking at Black Knight's log didn't give me any clue ...)

I didn't play the Hi-res one, I went to low-res directly when I saw you played the hi-res on Geforce 8800... but having heard there's shadow in the hi-res version, i'm definitely trying it.

Don't know if you have better solutions to the loading-phase lag problem, but a simple fix would be to throw in a loading page like I did in my entry (blatant boasting :D ). But the ultimate solution would still be optimization of course.

Wish you best luck on making your way into XBox Live!

Hmm that sounds very strange. What OS are you on?
It's an XNA project, and everything is supposed to be included in the deployment installer. Try downloading this: XNA Redistributable 3.1.

Not sure why it would crash there, not really much happens when starting the game, except for loading the enemy positions etc.. as all models are pre-loaded before the menu screen. I looked through the code but didn't see anything that could be the reason, and your computer should definitely run it. It doesn't have any extensive error checking though, so might be some set-up failing. Did you try the low-res version?