Supreme Commander demo crashing

This is a problem I've had since Monday and I have absolutely no clue how to stop it. The game in the past would occasionally pause during certain intervals before resuming. Now I either crash straight to desktop with error messages or the game would completely unresponsive and I'd hear horrible clicking noises either from the sound card or my HDD. I've installed the application memory hotfix along with the performance and reliability hotfix last week and didn't have a problem until yesterday.

The error messages I get are titled APPCRASH with the problem files in question msvcR80.dll and nvd3dum.dll. I'm going to restart my PC with the Vista HDD checkdisk to verify if any errors are present. I did disable a couple of processes on Saturday but they didn't crash the game on Sunday despite 2-3 sessions straight over 2-3 hours so I'm really struggling to identify my problem here.

The weirdest part is that the game could not dump the error file in my APPdata folder saying it didn't have enough space, I don't understand since I have less than 1MB in the Supreme Commander folder. The folder Gas powered games has less than 2MB as well.

 

Update: Having uninstalled and reinstalled 169.04 with driver sweeper to help clean up residual files, run Vista checkdisk on my C drive and a full memory test on Dell diagnostics, I still can't resolve the problem. Game crashes 5 minutes into game with the same error messages and file names as listed in the first post. Really have no idea what I've done to make it so crash-prone.

Anyone out there with suggestions? Especially curious as to why the game can't write to my temp folder even though it's virtually empty.