Oh man I used to have this problem a few years ago and then I fixed it and was able to help quite a few people fix it. I never had this games for windows live issue that starts off the instructions posted below.
From what I remember I know you had to go into the .ini file I believe and change a few things and the main issue was you needed to set the game to run on only 1 core. You can set it to 2 cores if you plan to stream or something but it added a higher chance to crash at some point.
Then as the other guide states you disable auto save and a few others. I will look for the link to how to set the cores. I believe it was a YouTube video