Bioshock - UPDATE

Recap:
Bioshock for PC kept crashing when I reached the medical center. When I say crash, I mean that while I still had sound, I was now looking at a black screen and neither my controls on my Xbox 360 controller nor the keys on my keyboard, to include Ctrl+Alt-Delete buttons, were functioning. This required a hot boot, which I never enjoy doing (pressing and holding the power button until the laptop or PC shuts down).

Possible Fixes?
While searching online I found many 'possible' fixes to the issue, three of which I tried. The first (not noted in my previous post) was to turn Windows Mode on in Bioshock. The only thing this accomplished was a smaller viewing area, the game still crashed at the Medical center. In light of that I would freely state that this did not work, at least for me.

The second option was to to turn off startup programs as outlined by Dave - Gerbil in Training who wrote into http://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=52899 with directions on how to modify your start up. I never reached the medic center because I was too frustrated at the fact that I lost sound. Having some knowledge of hardware and software configuration, I even attempted to modify it manually (manually selecting what to start and not start) but to no avail.

The third option was to turn off the 'High Detail Shader' option within Bioshock. In addition, I also closed all non-essential startups once I was brought to the Windows Vista desktop. Though I noticed the difference in colorization immediately, I was more pleased with the fact that now I was able to get past the bottle neck. I have read online that after you have started your task you could go back and turn on the 'High Detail Shader' but opted not to take the chance.

One would think that would be the last issue I encountered, but alas it was not. Things were going smoothly until I went to purchase items from the Vending machine. This caused my game to freeze and my internal fan starting running in hyper speed. Yet again I had to do a hot boot to shutdown my laptop as neither the controller or keyboard were responsive. I just encountered the issue last night and have had little time to research the issue, but did locate one suggestion, which was to turn off SLI (posted at http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5535 ). I have not tried this so please be careful. I will continue to research until I find and validated a workaround. I will be sure to post the 'fix' here. I should note that I was able to hack the vending machine without issue. It wasn't until I clicked the 'A' button and the list of items in the vending machine displayed that the screen froze.