To anyone who may be interested
Problem solved and quite easily.
I just applied a very simple fix I had seen elsewhere - maybe on these fora - regarding the same kind of glitches and crashes.
In the file swkotor.ini , I had this line :
"Disable Vertex Buffer Objects=1"
which I modified like this:
"DisableVertexBufferObjects=1" ...without blank spaces between the words
It did the trick.
I guess I wouldn't have experienced so painful an experience in Telos (and another crash, in the Prologue, at the beginning of the outside scenes), had I used this earlier.