I finally got my CE last night,loaded it up (thanks for posting how to get it to load from disk not steam) and started playing. Not to brag but i went almost 4hours and never had an issue so it got me thinking. The past few days waiting on my CE i have been reading the horror stories in the forums, question that comes to mind is this. What version of windows are you using and could that be part of the problem? I game on a dual core box with XP installed. maybe it dosnt like Vista or 7 as much?

Im using Vista and i haven't had a single issue in 30 hours of game time.. the only bug was with the quick and auto save... and i hardly even use those... and now they are apparently fixed.

i am fairly sure it is compatible with all syestems.

There is actually truth to this. Because XP only supports up to Direct X 9, and the Direct X10 and 11 cards/drivers/DX files have been causing issues at launch, such as the many NPC slow down issue, it makes sense that the XP works better. The work around is a using a d3d file from a video card that doesn't support anything highter that DX9, which is why XP users are probably having smoother frame rates and no slow down/stuttering.

not sure about this. I have win 7 64 bit. relatively bug free.
no stutter, no lag so far, 18 hours of play.

1 problem does arise tho. after a few hours of game play, I do sometimes get the black screen of death. but not often.
home made system.
Amd Phenom II X4 955 proc 3.2 ghz
4 gb ram
ati radeon hd 5700