I only think its about graphic card driver. I have quite old PC with XP Sp3 also I downloaded newest DirectX, Framerks 3,4, XNA frameworks and I never have any crashes of Construct. I use quite old graphic driver (I don't need Crysis...), so maybe you can change driver for your video card, and check again? And use some cleaning tools - Advanced System Care (free) and Auslogics Boostspeed ($). CCleaner is good too!
Some time ago I used some newest drivers from nVidia (16X.XX I think), and performance on some stricte 2D games (like Zen-Ichi or Patriot Dark) are horrible! Then I installed some old drivers (94.XX) and everything works like a charm!