Game Crash - Any way to disable burning effect?

Hello everyone, I started playing this awesome game for the first time a few days ago, but I came across a few problems.

First of all, this computer isn't an over the top machine, but it can run pretty decently games like Borderlands, TF2 and Left 4 Dead 2. When I started playing Monday Night Combat, I had to lower the settings and I even changed a few settings in the HostileEngine.ini file. The game runs like a charm, I am having a blast, but when my character is on fire, the game crashes. The screen freezes, however I can alt+tab and close the game from the desktop.

I've been messing around again with the HostileEngine.ini file, disabling/dumbing down stuff like shaders and particles and stuff like that, but the problem persists. I test the burning effect quickly by going in-game, selecting the Assault class and getting damaged by my own mines.

So, I was wondering if it is possible to disable this "burning effect", which is, when your character is surrounded by this flaming orange aura? Could anyone help me? I really want to play this brilliant game.

If that is any help, I'm using Windows Vista and the graphics card is a NVIDIA GeForce 8200M G (notebook, I know)

What driver version are you using?

I'd try updating that to see if it fixes the problem.

I'm pretty sure I have the latest drivers... but I'll look into it, I'll make sure they're really up to date, and see if that solved the problem.

Wow, I feel like a moron now. :lol:

Turns out NVidia released new drivers for my card earlier this month, and I had still yet to update. The burning effect doesn't crash on me now.

After updating, however, the game would launch with two big black bars in each side of the screen. This happened on all my games built on the Unreal Engine, actually (Borderlands and Killing Floor, por example). This computer has a 16:9 resolution (1366x768), a very uncommon one. The black bars were just a screen-scalling problem. I just had to tweak some options in the NVidia control panel and in the Monday Night Combat files. And everything is fine again. Damn.

So, what did we learn? Always update your drivers. It's the most basic and vital thing to do, and I completely skipped that step. Thank you BulletMagnet for reminding me.
I can finally play this game without problems. My Steam username is doctor_costa, maybe you'll find me in multiplayer every now and then.
Many thanks!