Well that sucks. Have you tried uninstalling, rebooting and re-installing? Seems weird that you can get into the game - load everything up, play the game for a few minutes and THEN it crashes. At that point everything should pretty much be loaded. If it was only off loading save games (like my earlier issue) it stands to reason something in the loading process fails. If its when doing X, it should be related to X. Your symptoms seem really random though.
Got any crazy security/virus protection that might be holding up a file as its trying to get loaded?
Any issues playing other games? Like maybe your hardware is getting flaky? Overheating Ram or GPU?
Have you checked task manager when playing? Possibly running out of memory? I usually seem to be running at a gig to 1.5 gigs of ran for it. It did crash once when I got up to 2 gigs but that could be unrelated.
Possibly running out of drive space?
Again, seems random that it would be affecting all those different actions.