Some extra helpful info from ... GeneralAdmission ...
Greetings all,
I recently installed SS2 on my widescreen rig and tried the official widescreen solution from The_cranky_hermit. It worked except for the FOV setting, and upon investigation I found that for some reason the game was deleting the plr_fFOVOverride = 90.4 line from Sam2.ini whenever it started. Entering the FOV via the console while playing worked fine. So I went back to the Sam2.ini file, added the FOV info, marked the file as READ-ONLY, then started the game and it worked perfectly with the new FOV.
PS- If anyone has encountered graphics problems/crashes, or the "application has malfunctioned" error, try changing this line in Sam2.ini:
gfx_iAPI = 2; (D3D)
to
gfx_iAPI = 1; (OpenGL)
OpenGL mode fixed all my errors and seems to run just fine.