Try running the application as Administrator (even if the account you're using has admin rights), right-click GoW shortcut > Properties > Advanced > Run with different credentials. It will ask you which account to use when you double-click it now, select Administrator and just enter your password.
That (seemed) to solve my crashing errors, I also had quite bad stuttering in-game, more than I should have had imo with my system. If you do try editing:
C:\Documents and Settings\<USERNAME>\My Documents\My Games\Gears of War for Windows\WarGame\Config\WarEngineUserSettings.ini
Change: OnlyStreamInTextures=FALSE > OnlyStreamInTextures=TRUE
Don't forget you'll need to edit the Administrator path in the above if you're running it as Administrator, rather than the account you're actually logged into.
Oh, I noticed you said you'd tried the patch. You should also try the fix
here, not really to do with the error you describe but there seems to be a lot of errors with it at the moment and no decent patch from Epic yet.
I also had quite bad screen tear in-game with VSYNC off or on. Try changing decals (I think) from dynamic to static if you get that far, that seemed to help with that.
Hope it's some use, seems to be lots of complaints around the boards about GoW PC. Not so much about the game itself, rather about the total gameplay stopping bugs which are well known about and have not been addressed by the producers.
Please help!
