Alright, even without knowing much about computers (which is in general a bad idea when participating in a beta test of a pre alpha tech demo = severely unfinished, highly buggy, mostly changing, very techy program) the fact that there is a severe but as of yet unexplained performance problem with the server should have gotten through...
Anyway, not updating is the best solution for new installs until the performance issue is resolved. The crashes are mostly sound related, so turn that off in the setup program.
Secondly, some remaining crashes will still occur. Your character is stuck, and because you run the unupdated version, the (partial) fixes aren\'t available to you (they are in the update).
Thus, you need to use the \"/unstick\" command to unstick the character, which will happen frequently with this version.
Remember that this is nowhere near a full game.