Oops - I hit enter to make a new line.  Little did I know that that posted it.  Neway, to finish:  After the first crash, I pushed right arrow even more, so as to get through the conversation faster, and I made it through.  After the slylandro incident, it continued to happen with other races, specifcally the VUX.  Then again, it may only be that I was talking to the VUX more than usual while trying to get them to admit that they're insufferable bigots...      BTW, I'm on Windows XP with a fairly good system and I'm using the commands  -o -r 1600x1200 -c bilinear -m -T 0 -d 32

I had played through the game without any problems on the dialogue screen, until I got to the Slylandro homeworld.  I suppose that I must have pushed right arrow a lot, but I cannot truly remember...