death by compatibility

Can someone help me please!? Got FF7 for my PC despite the fact it says "win 95" on the box and i’m running XP so it’s kinda my own fault. With the AnimeVamp patch uninstalled and my compatibility settings enabled it runs fine, with the occasional random crash, save for one scene. Where cloud visits his past in Kalm, i can get right up to the "sephy walking through fire (and looking badass)" scene, but when it tries to jump to the cutscene i get "an error occured with FF7.exe" and it dies on me.
Anyone know any fixes for this? I’ve browsed the forums, downloaded patches and played around with compatibility settings, tried using 640*480 fullscreen and windowed, using software and hardware rendering (of which the software looks better, bizzarely), and nothing seems to get me past this scene. :'(
Alternatively, anyone know a good place for downloading unhacked save files? No joy so far and all the character editors i’ve attempted using to rectify the problem (lvl99 in sector7 slums? why?) invariably crash or glitch the game in some way.
My PC’s got an Nvidia Gefore FX 5200, an intel pentium 4 and i’m running SP2 if that makes any diff. Thanks for any help you can give, or otherwise just for getting to the end of this essay 😛

y’know, don’t worry. I’ve played around with every patch under the sun, and it seems you need a new combination of patches and settings to get around each glitch. FF7 is one of the best games i’ve ever played, but when you need ten hours debugging for every hours gameplay . . . 🙁