Thx scottycroft! 
Actually, the iMac runs it smoothly without any glitches so far
. It should be noted that it IS a regular windows install, it's not an emulator or anything flaky, running a full licensed copy of WinXP SP3 on a separate partition.
I'm pretty sure that my crash issues are coming from having an older video card, Radeon X850 XT PT, which IIRC is a DirectX 9.2 card while Brad mentioned that they were targeting 9.3 or later. All the drivers are up to date, and when the machine was bought it was quite a good gamers rig... ::shrug::
Anyway, Looking forward to seeing how things evolve in the Beta, my 8 year old declared Beta 1 Of E: WoM to be "Kinda fun" and he has a pretty low tolerance for boring strategy games, I'm afraid I've spoiled him with my collection of great of TBS games
. Ah well... Maybe I need to move up to a modern card anyway... At least I've got PCie X16 support and a 6 pin power cable, which most machines from when this box was bought wouldn't have had
.