I had that same crashing issue in FO1. It's a sound driver issue with the FMVs in the game, and I could never make it work even with win95/98 compatibility mode.
Are you still using XP SP1 by chance? The problem went away for me when I upgraded to SP2, and now both Fallout 1 & 2 work perfectly. I can even use the installer on the cd-rom rather than the old
manual install process.