A number of folks have found it necessary to play the game without music and sound effects in order to avoid a situation where the game crashes. A couple of days ago, I got the same crash and have spent some time trying to identify the cause. I've also had the benefit of a couple of beta .exe files from Luca during what turned out to be a very frustrating process.
I can't say for certain that I have found an answer, but I'm reasonably confident that the basic problem is not the sound package nor is it the WWI.exe. I think it is much more likely to be hardware/driver-related and, therefore, a complete nightmare for the developer.
We discovered, for example, that Luca and I have computers which are pretty much identical in terms of specification and yet I have a save game which crashes on my machine, but runs perfectly on his.
The real difference, and therefore the possible cause of the problem, is the age of the audio driver. In other words, if this driver has not been updated for a while - as was the case in my computer, or even at all, then a crash is much more likely to happen. This is particularly important in cases where the game is being run on machines using on-board sound cards.
What I would suggest is that if you are one of the players who has experienced a sound-related crash, then have a look at your audio driver and check that it is the most up-to-date. This may help - I'd be really interested to know if it does.
Bern