Game crashing on load

Support and Bug Reports
1

Platform: PC

Steps To Reproduce: None

Images / Videos: None, but can be acquired if desired

Host or Client: Host

Players in your game: Just me

Specifications: Intel i5-4440 3.1 GHz, 32 GB ram, Windows 7 64-Bit, nVidia GTX 960

Had frequent crashes before the patch preventing progress after crossing the first bridge. Now after updating I am crashing just as the game finishes loading my save. Was worried it might just be my save so I made a new character, but they also crashed right after loading the game. I could hardly play the game before, but now I cannot play at all.

2

I have actually encountered this as well. On Windows OS, according to a Crash dump file and DxDiag, issues seem to stem from 2 problems, A: Windows Defender is somehow interfering and B:
Exception Code: 0xC0000005
Exception Information: The thread tried to read from or write to a virtual address for which it does not have the appropriate access.
I have been attempting to test various settings, but to no avail