I think turning all your settings to MAX may be the issue....
I have an new Core I7 and the friend I often play with has the same pc, we both have new solid states, new graphics cards, same Win 7u64, etc etc
I turn all my settings to Maximum and he leaves his on default, we play 'largish' games 80-100 planets and usually play 2 vs 6, since we got our new pc's the game doesn't slow down or get sticky but about 4 times now I have Had Minidumps and got kicked out the game while he has been fine.
So could it just be that a 32bit game runs out of memory on those huge.... 8x 2000 fleets fighting in system
he was also the host each time?