Resinstalled and have the same problem, so I did a little more work on this.  

It turns out that the slow-loading of saved games occurrs only after a certain point in the game.  That is, all of my early save games load fine, but the later ones do not.

And, it is only after I load one of those slow-loading saved games that the game crashes on any subsequent save attempts.

I'm not sure if any game "event" took place between the good saves and the bad saves, but I will try to find out.

Is it possible that a bad bit of data was saved and that forever after that save-game tree is corrupted?

Just 1-2k.

Also, I havent modified any of the default settings.  The game was working fine, including save/load.  I didnt change anything prior to having this problem.

I'll try reinstalling to see what happens.

I've been playing for less than a day with no problems, but all of a sudden I cannot save my game without hanging the application or crashing out.  Also loading saved games is now taking an extremely long time.  In the text, the last line is always "Thread 'game clock' blocking on semaphore 'Clock'."

Any ideas what has gone wrong or what I can do to fix this?