[Pirate]

By crashing do you mean blue screen? or is it just IL2 that is crashing? it might be worth checking for new drivers for the sound card, and making sure all the settings in il2setup.exe are correct before doing anything major. And if there is software for the 5.1 system you have it might be worth checking to make sure that all the speakers are outputting properly as well.

Also do you have problems with any other games/programs? that might help determine if it is IL2 that is the problem, or something system related. If none of that helps maybe reinstalling the game might help.

Also - just checking on google breifly i found this:

If you don't get audio output in il2, first check others apps, esp. wine-apps. Also check ingame settings. If this was not the problem, maybe you need to edit your "conf.ini" file (can be found in your gamedir):

Find section "[sound]":

Set "SoundUse=1 ",
Set "Speakers=2" (or more)

Try not to use other audio applications when running il2!

Maybe that will help...

Good luck


Edit:

Also, if you click on start - go to 'run' type in 'dxdiag' will bring up the diagnostic program for directx - there is a sound tab with a test function which might help identify a problem, IL2 should be running in opengl, but I don't know of a way to test opengl....