Diablo II shareware setup crashes (with unhandled exception or heap assertion) upon startup (due to AC97 heap corruption)

ros r76032 gcc dbg
on VBox 4.3.40 with VBEMP and AC97

This is a regression.
The setup program dies directly after starting it with unhandled exception.
r76032.png
r76032-d2-shareware-setup-crash.log

Exact guilty rev is not found yet,
but it broke somewhere between r75857(working) and r76032(broken).

Edit: Looks like the exception I posted here might only be a follow-up of heap-assertion triggered by our AC97 driver.