What happens when it crashes? Does quake3 give you a message, or does it just drop you to the desktop? Does it happen in other q3 mods too, or in vanilla q3? Does the game actually run for a while before it crashes, or does it crash before you can start playing?
If there's no message then you might have a problem with your graphics driver. If you can play other OpenGL games ok, then your quake 3 installation might me screwed up. But I'm guessing you have a driver problem, or possibly a hardware conflict/instability.
If the 'bugfix' is the wq3 b2.1 patch, it's available
here. But not having it won't cause a crash, you just won't be able to join a server.