After spending about... a long ass time fixing this, it seems to be a memory allocation issue with the game. Dashboarding is the most reliable way to avoid the crash, though it still happened on some occasions. I tried avoiding guards, routing around them, dying and going to the checkpoint, they all crashed more often than the Dashboard strat.

Aww, our little Pac is all growed up, got his own site and everything BibleThump 7