I noticed tunring off the Newspaper helped me too. Thats really unnessesary and it gets annoying. Also, turning on fast computer cuts down the RAM needed.
Yes, if you download it somewhere it runs very slow after a wile, the same thing happend to me, buy it instead online or somthing, its prety hard to find it in the stores now.
Sadly, the v133 patch does not fix everything and there are still a lot logical errors to be dealt with. For instance, for some reason I can still have more than one AA gun in the same territory. It is not these errors that enrage me (anybody can avoid these problems by just not performing them), but the horrid AI in the game and the sudden crashes (the later being somewhat corrected in v133).