Richard,
What I did on mine,a dual core AMD 3800 with 2 gig ram, was to set memory allocation and resources to programs rather than appearance. You can do this under system, advanced tab, in Control Panel. This reverted the appearance back to Classic Windows schemes, but I am more interested in how well it runs. This alone stopped about 80% of the crashing and all the MSCVR80.dll problems.
Another thing I did was remove Intellipoint 6.1 and installed 5.2. I am using a MS Wheelmouse. I know there is a conflict with 6.1 and CS3, so I thought I would try reverting to 5.2 and it helped slow down the crashes.
I almost forgot, I also defragged all my hard drives. This seemed to add a performance increase, although nothing earth shattering. Defragging helped CS2, more than anything else, in the time it takes to load and open.
I upgraded to XP and installed Lightroom on the same day so I have had to "debug" two programs simultaineously, but I have both running fairly smoothly with good speed.
HTH
Rich