Hi Texel,
I just ran your code (modified it a little bit to initialize LE and so on) and am afraid to say it crashes on me too but not on the same line. My display driver stops responding on:
CEGUI::Window *root = wm.loadWindowLayout("test.layout");
I then opened up an old sample project I wrote for Shard a while back, copy/pasted your code in and it ran fine. Only difference being it used an slightly older version (0.7.1 for VS2008) of CEGUI and version 2.32R5 of LE.
I am afraid that without source access to LE I cannot safely say whether this is a problem caused by the engine or by CEGUI. On the one hand you would say that it is a call to a CEGUI system and as such has nothing to do with LE but on the other hand, the CEGUI user base is so wide, one could reasonably expect loading a predefined layout to work fine or people would have complained already.
You can try running the old, 0.7.1 VS2008 binary version of CEGUI I used back when I wrote the tutorial and see if that helps. You can compile your application with the VS2008 binaries if you have VS2008 installed alongside VS2010. You can modify your VS2010 project settings to compile your project using VS2008. I can understand if you do not wish to go through all this trouble but if you do manage to get this working, I would dearly like to know what fixed it.
Cheers!