Common reasons why Red Alert 3 crashes

The new Red Alert 3 game crashed several times at either startup or when trying to exit. At the time my PC was still set to a resolution of 1280 x 960. A friend of mine with my much older graphics card had too much additional effects enabled because he wants games to look nice, but sacrifices frame rate and ultimately gameplay.

According to my reading on the forum of the Command and Conquer website, most crashes seem to be graphics related as well a high resolution. To test this, I set my resolution down to 1024x768 and for several weeks now I had no more crashing, which used to be several times normally. My friend set his settings a bit down to what the game recommends and suddenly it is working again without crashing.