If you put something eating RAM on your user-startup, then there is the chance you're running out of chip RAM when running the game. Try looking into your startup sequence to see if you can skip something for now. Maybe that BetterWB.
Yeah, good point. My startup is just the standard 3.1 startup but I do have a lot of harddrives mapped and those eat up memory. And I think the fancy icon set I'm using too might contribute
Ok, I've doublechecked this and I have 1.8Meg of Chip RAM available when trying to start. But I have found the culprit so I've updated my note above with the fix