Bumping this with a bit of new data.
I ran 7 games with HRP and polymer. Eduke build 1704. HRP was last updated a couple days ago. nothing else in the folder. No mods, no munking around with cfg files and whatnot.
Crash #1
Door to the E1L1 exit (where the two pig cops are after the wall blows up, crash log 1)
Crash #2
Right as E1L1 starts (crash log 2)
Next 5 crashes happened the exact same way as crash #2. Level would not even start (crash log 3 4 5 stopped copying logs at that point)
Next I played with duke in 8bit mode. I unzipped 1704 into an empty folder then copied my grp file. That's it. Played through e1l1, e1l2 fine. Played through e1l3 up to the big room after the blue door. 1st time in there, fine, second time I came in ka boom. No HRP, log looks roughly the same (to a layman).
Included all logs mentioned above in a zip file.
EDIT: I played with my in-game settings a bit, basically pushing everything to max. Still crashing, but I'm able to do a lot more stuff before that happens. First time I crashed it was in the courtyard of death row. After loading from a save to see if it would crash in the same place, I made it to the outside area with the secret teleporter. Crashed after I lowered the water level and tried to jump in. Including log from latest crash (I'm a nub and forgot to save log from first crash)
Second edit... I'm tired.
Settings changed (all under render)
Vsync on (was off)
Antistropic Filtering from x2 to x4
Texture cache from compressed to on.
Ambient light level from 1.0 to .75