Yeah I've tried this again, and no luck. No crash this time, just an endless load...well, about 10 minutes, anyway.
I started to wonder if my getting the DLC might be the source of the problem, as the events seem to coincide...been about three days since I downloaded them, and it was about 380MB, which if I remember is about the size of the full game?
Islandia seemed to have heard that this was a known issue. I couldn't find anything too specific, but I did try moving the whole DLC folder out of the assets folder and retrying. But then the GMR save was the wrong one, for a different game.... Manually downloaded the correct save from the website...then went to load it (turn 54, seems right)...and it said I couldn't cause I lacked the right DLC. oh boy!
It's going to take me a while to sort this out...any info or other known solutions appreciated. I'm not sure I put my DLC folder back in the right place, so I may have to reinstall.... Anyway, what a big unanticipated hassle...I'm going to have to dig into it later. Big concern though that the game was telling me I couldn't load a vanilla save due to not having the correct DLC, when I have all the DLC! Agh.