I just posted my problem which sounds very similar to yours: cg compiler crash, no core, clean hpl.log.
I tried setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH as you did and get exactly the same result: Now the intro runs (or a part of it, I don;t know) before it crashes. Furthermore, the crash message is much shorter, I only get:
(0) : fatal error C9999: *** exception during compilation ***
Cg compiler terminated due to fatal errorSegmentation fault
What I noticed is that with your LD_LIBRARY_PATH one library (libGLU) is linked from the system directory, while the default links to the games lib directory. Maybe this is a problem with the graphics card libs after all? I have a nvidia with the 185.18.14 drivers on a 64bit gentoo.
Cheers, Levent