I was having this problem for ages until a few days ago. I don’t think it works for everyone, but what i had to do was open my anti-virus software and create an exception for my ‘Documents/MyGames/Crysis’ folder and i can now change settings without any problems.
I think it’s because your anti-virus software see’s it as “oh noes somethings accessing these files KILL IT!”, hence the crash.
Hope this helps
Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll let you know how it goes when Steam feels like letting me play it again. Right now it’s telling me “This game is currently unavailable. Please try again later.” Piece of freakin’ shit…
Oh shit, that sucks. I know this is the problem as I’ve tried it several times. Every time installing 1.21 breaks the game for Win7. Perhaps you could find out what files 1.21 changes and find the 1.2 versions of those files?
You’d have to make sure steam isn’t automatically updating the game, though, before you do anything like that.
It could be that there is a corrupted file in one of the games folders. For example: When I played through and area of crysis, the game crashed while loading a new level. When I restarted the game and clicked on the “load game” button to load the saved games menu the game would crash attempting to pull up the list of saved games. If I tried to access that list to save a game it would crash trying to load the list. It was because crashing while the game was saving/changing level created a corrupted saved games file. What I had to do was go in and find the folder with the saved games. Make a copy of it incase I messed up, and then procceed to delete save files until I load up the game and it doesn’t crash when I click on the “load game” button. It could be possible that you have a corrupted file somewhere. Maybe when the game crashed while trying to save some of your preferences, it created a corrupted preferences file. Once again, I do not know if this will fix your problem, but it did fix my save games problem. You might try making a copy of the folders somewhere and then removing some files one by one until it works.
Another thing you could try from the list of “I don’t know if this will help but ANYTHING at this point is worth a shot”, is trying to run it in DirectX9 mode. You can set it to directx9 mode by going to steam>games tab, right click on crysis>properties, click launch options, and enter “-dx9” (without the quotations of-course) into the text space provided. I had a lot of crash errors in the final battle sequence of crysis, and this fixed them up and overall made the game run a little smoother for me. I read somewhere this usually helps in reducing bugs on some systems.
Edit: you could track someone down who has the retail version with the 64bit exe. and see if they can’t copy the files you need and paste them into the proper folder, and see if that doesn’t work. I don’t know if the necessary files can sent by email, but if it can, you might find someone on here who might be able to help you in that regard. I can’t, I have the steam version as well.
Edit2: I did some reading, and some people on the steam forum seem to think that the reason 64bit version of crysis wasn’t included in steam was because the shift +tab overlay wasn’t compatible with the 64bit version. I don’t know if this is true, and I know it really doesn’t help you, but its atleast midly interesting to here why the 64bit version wasn’t included.
Edit3: After reading some I found this on the steam forums, it almost sounds like the work around you tried, but you mentioned Crysis Warhead, and not Crysis wars. So here’s what this guy said. If its the same post you got the idea to mess the with bins, then disregard, but if not its another idea that falls under the “I don’t know if this will help but ANYTHING at this point is worth a shot” category.
These are the only probable (and improbable) fixes I can find at the moment. Like I said, if nothing esle works, you may just need to partition your hard drive and put a supported 32-bit OS on it.
Again, thanks for the suggestions guys. I’d try them out, but Steam is still being a little bitch and won’t even let me start the game, even after doing a(nother) reinstall.
Holy shit! This did it! Thanks a lot dude, this issue has been bothering me for months.
(Sorry 'bout the double post, but this is a significant update)
No problem, just glad it worked 
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