Crimson Skies, XP and DirectX 9.0c

Has anybody tried to play Crimson Skies lately with the most recent version of DirectX?

I just picked up the game off eBay, and everything goes smoothly until I'm actually in-flight. I can fly around forever as long as I don't trigger an event (ie. mission change, enemy interceptors, etc). As soon as that happens, the game dumps me back to the XP desktop with no error messages.

I tried the game unpatched, patched to 1.1 and patched to 1.2. 1.2 is actually the worst because it doesn't seem to even wait for a triggered event like the 1.1 patch. It just dumps me out after 4 or 5 seconds.

I've read that there were serious memory leaks with this game, but I'm not sure if that's the problem.

Just wanted to know if anyone was successful or if I should just give up trying. It would be a shame because I loved playing the game on my friend's XBox.