8gb with nothing running and 5.2 free
and 1.3 cached
Well this does explain the crash (the game tries to load 6G of RAM when it crashes.)
However, I'm pretty sure it shouldn't try to load so much. Except checking the files (generating a SHA of the archive then comparing it to one someone would post here (I don't have the archive anymore, so I can't do that), I can't think of much you can do.
Maybe you can try to increase the SWAP or PAGEFILE size. Since you only have 8G of RAM, 8 to 12G of pagefile/swap can be useful. Unless you're also running out of storage space, in which case I would recommend cleaning or upgrading your machine. I hate myself so much for saying that. One shouldn't have to upgrade their computer (unless it's like 10 years old, alright)