I'm in the same timezone so I know it's getting late

.
The mod as far as I know hasn't been tested with pre windows vista for a couple of years.
The fact no error log is created suggest it to be either one of 2 problems.
1 the engine is going into an infinite loop and tries to bail out before it crashes.
2 there is some other issue with the engine which doesn't get reported.
Unless I have a testing place of my own I'm not sure we'll be able to fix this.
What you could do finally is set:
DEBUG_EXPERIENCE
and
DEBUG_POSTINIT
to 2 instead of 1
and post the logs again after a crash...if anything would go weird in the leveling it would show up here (just to really make sure it's not an infite loop due to timing issues)