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Did the installed "Tribes of the East" also crash after patch 3.1 was applied? This would help rule out disk check errors. I don't remember if the disk check was removed in version 1.6... it seems like it was kept, judging by the fact that there's a fix that removes it, which is the first result in the search. It might be worth trying that.
You could also investigate setting some parameters through autoexec in the profiles folder, for example, setting windowed mode by adding the following line at the end:
setvar gfx_fullscreen = 0
Temporarily disable sound in the game, move/rename the video folder with the cutscenes to check if they are playing at startup.