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In Sound options, the following were set by default:
Digital Sound: Default DirectSound Device
MIDI music: Win32 MIDI Mapper

I changed them to:
Digital Sound: Default WaveOut Device
MIDI music: Disable music

Also in the game, I changed the dialog setting from Voice + Text to Text only (no speech).  The result is that the only sound were sound effects.
I have not been able to reproduce any crashes since.  I then turned the Voice (speech) back on inside the game but still couldn't get it to crash so far.
I'll try some more later, but I suspect maybe it was the MIDI music that had something to do with my problems.  Maybe there is a driver issue that overwrote some memory, and at some point when another sound function is triggered it causes a crash.   If anyone has any ideas let me know but at least the above is a workaround for anyone that runs into this particular issue (and the game is still quite playable without the music).  I'm not sure if this is typical of all rooms in the game, but the rooms I've crashed in such as the oasis (Room 31?) and indian chief's tent etc, all have music + ambient background sound + speech during dialog (oasis has music + waterfall + ...).

I'm using a relatively ordinary (cheap) Dell Dimension E510 with the preinstalled OEM version of Windows XP Home w/ SP2 (32bit) and 1GB RAM.  It has an ATI Radeon X600 256MB graphics card and the on-motherboard audio (SigmaTel HD Audio, some kind of AC'97 compatible chip).  The system was current with all updates from Windows Update (including any hardware drivers), but I honestly haven't checked for updated drivers from ATI or other component manufacturer sites in several months (I generally don't unless I run into a problem that points to a specific driver).
The Al Emmo version I'm running is a legally purchased and downloaded version from the TellTaleGames site, without any patches/hacks.  I'm running whatever the original game release version is (as far as I know there are no updates).
I was able to finish the game, so posting here is not for my benefit -- if it's a driver problem unique to my system then great(!), but I just want to be sure it's not something more people in general will run into either with the game or engine.  I'm willing to spend a modest amount of time to reproduce the crashes if that will help anyone -- let me know if there is some kind of debug logging I can turn on that will help narrow done the cause.

Edit:

Ok, I can recreate one crash fairly often in the same spot (sunscreen @ oasis quest series) ... here is one sample crash dialog:

Illegal exception
---------------------------
An exception 0xC0000005 occured in ACWIN.EXE at EIP = 0x00474452 ; program pointer is +155, ACI version 2.72.920, gtags (37,2)

AGS cannot continue, this exception was fatal. Please note down the numbers above, remember what you were doing at the time and notify CJ on the Tech forum.

in Room 31 script (line 1306)

Also once it unexpectedly quit the game and I was back at desktop with no crash dialog at all (!) and another time I got this:

Error
---------------------------
Error: Access violation at 0x00474450 (tried to read from 0xFFFFFFFF), program terminated.

I feel fairly confident now that I can get it to crash in one of the above ways again by using a save I have right before that point.  I'll also check with himalayastudios to see if they can provide some info on what happens in Room 31 script (line 1306).

[Edited by mod:]

Luckily I managed to complete the game with sheer persistence but I got at least a dozen "Illegal exception" crashes similar to the following along the way:
---------------------------
Illegal exception
---------------------------
An exception 0xC0000005 occured in ACWIN.EXE at EIP = 0x004DF582 ; program pointer is +7, ACI version 2.72.920, gtags (26,4)

AGS cannot continue, this exception was fatal. Please note down the numbers above, remember what you were doing at the time and notify CJ on the Tech forum.

Most versions of Windows allow you to press Ctrl+C now to copy this entire message to the clipboard for easy reporting.
---------------------------
OK   
---------------------------

I would also sometimes get crashes with less information, such as:
---------------------------
Error
---------------------------
Error: Access violation at 0x004275A0 (tried to read from 0xFFFFFFFF), program terminated.
---------------------------
OK   
---------------------------

I'm not really sure, but it seemed the crashes happened more frequently if I skipped dialog by clicking/hitting a key. If I restarted the game and just allowed the dialog to take its course, it seemed like it crashed less frequently. A crash also happened on occasion (of the latter kind I think) when saving... I was always able to restore from that save however, so it seems those crashes happened immediately after the save completed. I ran the game with default settings (fullscreen, subtitles + voice, etc) ... if it matters, I believe Al Emmo uses OGG for the audio.  Please let me know if I can help provide any more details to help track these errors down so they don't deter anyone from playing this game / using the AGS engine.

Edited by mod: Topics merged. But yes, read also the comments above.