I did start over from nothing. I know its hard to give up saves that you've invested time and thought plus interesting gear and character. With this round of updates though some (many?) of the error result in corrupted save files. It is difficult to rescue them once this happens. You might try putting your old save in a seperate folder, then do a complete new install and start a new game. If you still get slow save and load times then send you save file and a log file for that instance to Mavrik. This will help him with debugging and save you favorite save from being corrupted. Its an enjoyable game but basically we are all doing beta testing.