Portal Problems

It seems that I am not the only person having isses with the Valve game Portal, most of us seem to have the same issue. Namely the game crashes as soon as you go through the very 1st Portal giving the same memory address error, another common factor appears to be we all have the same Intel onboard graphics chip (Intel(R) 82945G Express Chipset Family).

I've tried all sorts of stuff, removed AVG as an Anti Virus solution (useful as its slow, memory hungry, crap compared to the previous version and have now started using Avast!), updated the device drivers (also helpful as it unlocked a boatload of new resolution settings my monitor was capable of displaying) and finally Googled for command line settings.

Now these work but BEWARE! They got me out of the 1st room and I stood there having a look around for a few moments only for my PC to totally crash and reboot itself so they MIGHT work for you but BEWARE (you can't say I haven't warned you!) that they may crash your PC too. I added these to the command line of the Portal exe.

-applaunch 400 -steam -dxlevel 81 +mat_forcehardwaresync 0 +mat_forcemanagedtextureintohardware 0 +snd_async_prefetch_priority 1 +mat_softwarelighting 1 +mat_reducefillrate 1 +mat_bumpmap 0 +mat_picmip 2 -w “1024″ -h “768″

Call me insane but I have a feeling sound and NOT graphics is the issue here, the original crash used to happen exiting the 1st room (as that happens a sound is supposed to play) and I noticed in the 2 times my game totally crashed my machine they were both when a triggered sound event happened, the last one being the voice of GLADOS. So I'm wondering if the sound were disabled would it fix the crashing issue?

Heres an improved version of the command line with some new tweaks added:-
-applaunch 400 -steam -dxlevel 81 +mat_forcehardwaresync 0 +mat_forcemanagedtextureintohardware 0 +snd_async_prefetch_priority +mat_softwarelighting 1 +mat_reducefillrate 1 +mat_bumpmap 0 + mat_specular 0 +mat_picmip 2 +mat_max_worldmesh_vertices 1024 +map_background none -autoconfig

Yet another improved version with even more commands:-

-applaunch 400 -steam -dxlevel 81 +mat_forcehardwaresync 0 +mat_antialias 0 + mat_disable_bloom 1 +mat_forcemanagedtextureintohardware 0 +snd_async_prefetch_priority +mat_softwarelighting 1 +mat_reducefillrate 1 +mat_bumpmap 0 + mat_specular 0 +mat_picmip 2 +mat_max_worldmesh_vertices 1024 +map_background none -heapsize 1024000 +datacachesize 128 -autoconfig

-nosound (in case the Glados is the issue)