Recently I have encountered a weird problem. When I start a race with French or Italian '95 mod, the game crashes at random, usually almost immediately. I tried changing all the graphical settings to the lowest possible values but to no avail. The problem did not occur with BTCC '98 and other mods (although I did not check all of them).
Now comes the interesting part. I used CFST '95 for my experiments. When I removed all Peugeots from the mod (the grid remained of the same size), crashes *almost* disappeared ("almost" because I think it did crash once or twice, but not at the very start at any rate). Ok, the problem is with 405 I thought, but continued experimenting. I put back all Peugeots and removed all Opels - the same thing, the problem disappeared. When I repeated the same trick with Alfa or BMWs, however, the game kept crashing.
I started commenting out various entries in Cavalier's CAS file and it turned out that crashes *almost* disappear when I remove brake/rain lights. I tried to remove animation from the lights material - everything worked. I put the animation back in but moved the textures from "Reloaded" folder (where they originally resided) to "Seasons" (where the light GMTs are located) - everything worked again. I did this both for 405 and Cavalier and it is more or less stable now. I cannot guarantee that the crashes are gone for good but at least I can now complete a race.
Does anybody know what this was all about? I mean, all search paths are correct (if the game had failed to find any textures it would of crashed consistently, not at random). Maybe it does not like having too many locations to search in for assets?