A ton of fun that took me way longer to fix than I’d like to admit:
On one of my retro systems, Tomb Raider 2 had always run flawlessly. However, when I wanted to blast my way through Venice with Lara yesterday, the game crashed instantly upon launching the Tomb2.exe with the message “Microsoft C++ Runtime library error (abnormal termination)”. Even reinstalling the game didn’t help.
After a long search, I finally stumbled upon an ancient Google Groups post that put me on the right track: Tomb Raider 2 is extremely sensitive when it comes to having the correct system date. Since the BIOS battery on my system was apparently dead, the system was showing the year 2098.
After a quick fix, Tomb Raider was running smoothly again.