Ok so looks like we need to do this all over again. So if you are getting this error you most likely have nvidia's 600-series. Sometimes you get this even with cards from earlier series from nvidia.
So far funcom hasn't been able to fix this major issue. This issue isn't fixed by getting some other version of drivers you now have. Sure IF funcom works this out with nvidia some day they might be able to fix this with driver update but so far we are still waiting on funcom to work on this problem. As for now they have had countless reports from us players and they haven't been able to figure out what is causing this. Or so they said months ago as they were last heard of. So let's report everything here and make enough noise so they would fix this nasty issue some day.
Only fix for this issue that is proven to work is to make your Prefs_3.xml read-only. This will not help with the issue that the game would crash any less but at least you don't need to set your settings every time the game crashes because this issue. Note that you can't save any settings from game if the file is read-only so you can make changes for the session only.
The file can be found on a win7 machine from:
Users\<login name>\AppData\Local\Funcom\Conan\Prefs\
So keep reports coming and hopefully they will get to the bottom of this and fix it.