Yeah same here keyt. I think its a windows 8 thing, but I tried changing csgo.exe to windows7 compatability mode and it still doesn't work. not sure if the launcher changes that. I found some posts where people said I should set cl_disablehtmlmotd to 1 but as soon as I type cl_ in console it also crashes. I tried changing it in config.cfg but I have no clue if that is in fact the one loaded by the game. Also, some people said the multi core rendering is also a problem, but as keyt said, I can't disable it as the game crashes immediately when I click apply on game settings.