Nevermind, I turned it back on and the crash didn't come back.
Rebooting however and launching the game again brought the crash back and changing the setting does nothing. I then proceeded to launch the game about 18 times in a row without changing anything or varying the time taken between the first launch and each subsequent launch. I did this by writing a mouse macro (auto hot key) and just setting it to repeat when the macro completed on a 15 second delay. Sadly this crash seems to have nothing to do with surface optimization.