Black screen and crashes after entering the game

As the title says, today I got hit by something nasty and my PoE client has most likely FUBAR`d.


Retracing my steps, the only thing that I did today that I havent done before is teamed up with people to try out how group play works. Yea, some liked sweeping up anything worth keeping ASAP (rares, orbs, skill gems) even before I got a glance at what it was, but others werent so, its all and good but that is not the issue.

The problem is that I constantly kept lagging up after a short time while grouped up and switching maps after a certain time caused me to disconnect (most likely the 6second ticker boot to prevent deaths). I have had memory issues with PoE for sometime now, the Out of Memory popup. But what happened this time was when I tried to log back into the character(marauder) I got stuck on the loading screen, happened a couple of times. After I switched to another character, I could enter the game world but now my game would end up in a black screen a minute after logging in (I can see the PoE centric mouse pointer for a few seconds longer though)and crashes to the desktop with the usual win error message: This program has terminated...send data to help Microsoft...etc. And now on any character (even the one that wouldnt log on before(marauder), I end up with black screen a minute after entering the world and the game crashes to the desktop.

Somewhere down the line, my game data has most likely corrupted, this could explain the memory issues and now the complete game failure. Going to do a fresh download and installation of the PoE client, I will update the post to included what happens then.
But why the data corrupted, I got no clue. Just posting to keep you guys informed that there might be some conflict or problem that might cause something such to happen.

System specs:
Win XP professional sp3
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 3.0 gigs
2gb RAM
ATI radeon HD 5450