Recent Update(s) Causing Crash?

I didn't pick anything up in the recent official update notes about technical changes, but has there been anything in the recent updates that would trigger my game to crash on me now all of a sudden? The game has been running near-flawlessly for me since day one (kudos to anet for delivering the most bug/hassle-free PC game experience I've had since as far as I could remember) and now I can't play no longer than a few minutes within logging into the game. Sometimes, no farther than the character select screen!

So what's happening? I could be walking, checking out my inventory, or just idle there watching good ol' trade spams fill my screen, and within minutes, kaput... my screen goes black and some distorted audio loops, requiring a hard boot to get back to my desktop.

I could be wrong, but I'm pointing my finger at recent in-game updates because I noticed there's been some spurts of updates recently including some scheduled downtime, etc. I suspect that it's GW exclusive, as well, because I've been unable to replicate the "crash" in other recent, graphically intensive games such as Far Cry, Doom3, F.E.A.R., CS:S, HL2: Ep1, and WoW (I know, I know, this is all a curse for having it still installed). I also haven't made any hardware changes in months or installed any new software recently, including drivers. I've uninstalled, defragged, and reinstalled GW on three drives now, all of which rendered the same result. Sad panda.

Help computer? :[

Edit: And by day one, I mean over a year ago. :[

scan your computer for spyware, viruses and the like, make sure GW is the ONLY other program you're running, and if the problem persists, do a system restore to an earlier date where you were not having these problems. Hope I helped a bit

Not likely, because my computer is completely clean and even I was experiencing those types of crashes (blue screen+physical memory dump just a night or two ago), not to mention bizarre glitches and bugs. Game crashed a few times, too.