Crashing Whenever Speaking to NPCs

I've played up until day 290, exciting because the invasion only recently occurred, but now the game has become unplayable, I'm now unable to speak to any lords or mercenaries without the game crashing. I'm getting this error:

"Mount&Blade: Warband has stopped working" followed by "A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is available."

I'm running Windows 7, read there's compatibility issues with this. I've enabled forced threading, changed the flag optimizing thing to 1, lowered all the graphics to the minimum, is there nothing else I can do? Quite disappointing that I don't get to finish this game.

Try using the "FIX- Remove duplicate lords" from camp menu should help it maybe.
If it tells you there were no duplicates the action to remove duplicates will be removed from camp menu, which will persist through savegames, so reload game if it did not fix anything.

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately it said no duplicates found and it still crashes whenever speaking to a NPC :/