Got tired of all the crashing and switched to playing Civ V for a bit, found that it was crashing at 1.2GB of RAM allocation too. So I just reinstalled the MS Visual C++ redistributable 2010 from the Microsoft web site. Civ V game went to 1.5 GB before I fell asleep. Will try to see how Elemental will do. Note I reinstalled the entire game from Impulse for each release. so it was a full install for every version. 1.11, 1.19a and 1.19b. There was some gibberish about .NET apps crashing at 1.2GB and I was guessing a bad version of the redistributable.
Sigh, nope does not fix it for Elemental. Still get a OOM error. 
http://pastebin.com/AEV4h8tq