It's such an unusual thing to be able to recover from a black screen in GP4 that I still think it can't be the game which is causing the problem.
In Win8, can you run the game and have the task manager running on top of it at the same time? That's what I'd do in Linux. If you can't so that, can you run the game in a window instead and keep an eye on the task manager at the same time?
If you could, you would be able to see what's happening to the CPU and memory usage as the fault occurs - and I'm fairly confident that you're going to notice that something else starts to demand 100% of the CPU or the memory when the game goes black.
At the very least, if the game goes black but the Task Manager remains visible you could be more certain that it really is a game problem.
I've had lots of black screens in my time but they have only been recoverable when it was something else trying to grab the screen or the memory, which forced the operating system to transfer the game into virtual memory to free up some RAM, which is the only way I can think of that would make things happen the way you describe.
Usually, if the game itself black screens it's because of a memory fault or because a GFX card shuts down because of overheating and it's always game over.
As I say I'm not a Windows user and I could be wrong, but that's my opinion on this.