dawn of war 2 totally unplayable for me-other people also having this issue?

This happens when every major Publisher/Company wan't his own DRM.
You culd try playing whitout internet conection, i remember that fixed the problems i had back in the day with OP Red River (Disc Version tho, steam one doesn't even install).

I think they removed the gfwl, but i dont know if its only in the beta branch if there is any, or you need to run it with a menu option on steam instead of the "play" button

remove include GFWL, download the latest client

It had GFWL removed, that shouldn't be your issue.

Just launched my DW 2, theres no GFWL there. How do you figure its causing your crashes?

edit
Care to share more details? When does it crash? Does it give you some error number? What OS youre running?

I have no issues with it. GFWL has been removed many months ago completely from the game. You could try posting on the steam hub. Unless things changed in the last 2 months, there was 1 dev still patching/fixing stuff, well stuff that can be fixed by 1 guy. You might get lucky and get it fixed, if the issue is on the game's side and not on yours anyway.

I had no issues whatsoever, works perfectly for me :/