That's the card I've got on my Thinkpad. It's part of a chipset that seems fairly widespread so I guess I'm not the only one with that problem. As you can imagine, FS2 is a great game for people stuck with such crappy cards...
This issue isn't specific to TBP (I think it's actually a FS2Open issue) but I'm posting here since I wouldn't be using FS2Open if it wasn't for you guys. Feel free move my post elsewhere to mod this out of existence.
What was happening was that events such as explosions (especially cap ships going down) were liable to crash the game. What I did (after much trial and error) was to lower the lighting setting to 3/5 and that took care of those crashes. The battle of the line (from EMW) is the only scenario that still crashed with a lower lighting level and taking all the settings down a notch (I can't be bothered to find out which one caused the problem) fixed that as well.
What about OpenGL? Well, it was basically unplayable (except with the "Enable More Realistic Lighting" switch for 3.6.7) because ships were so dark they were difficult to spot against a blackish background... talk about shadows! And since I couldn't play through RW2.2 with TBP3.3 (because of Hell and back) so I ended up facing Eris and her fans on TBP3.2/D3D.
If anyone's still reading, I wish to thank all the contibutors to this project for the great fun and the sweet B5 nostalgia.