**EDIT.... Not a Leadwerks problem, but it did help me identify it.
Finally decided to give Leadwerks another go (the new tree painting features are looking awesome) and have run into what I assume is the Radeon driver issue (again). Cannot even start Leadwerks, goes straight to the error "Exception_access_violation"
Just thought I'd post the details of my driver here.
Have tried the latest beta (29-Nov-2015) and the current "release" version. Same error, so I am pretty comfortable is stating that AMD has broken something again for me.
Driver details
Radeon Software Version - 15.11
Radeon Software Edition - Crimson
Windows Version - Windows 7 (Service Pack 1)
System Memory - 16 GB
CPU Type - Intel® Core™ i7-4700MQ CPU @ 2.40GHz
Graphics Card Manufacturer - Powered by AMD
Graphics Chipset - AMD Radeon™ HD8970M
Device ID - 6801
Vendor ID - 1002
SubSystem ID - 7104
SubSystem Vendor ID - 1558
Revision ID - 00
Bus Type - PCI Express 3.0
Current Bus Settings - PCI Express 3.0 x16
BIOS Version - 015.032.000.003
BIOS Part Number - BR44465.003
BIOS Date - 2013/04/23 04:09
Memory Size - 4096 MB
Memory Type - GDDR5
Memory Clock - 1250 MHz
Core Clock - 900 MHz
Total Memory Bandwidth - 160 GByte/s
2D Driver File Path - /REGISTRY/MACHINE/SYSTEM/ControlSet001/Control/Class/{4d36e968-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}/0001