Things you might do to test this out...
move a large portion of the girl files (not the pictures, just the girlsx and rgirlsx files) to another directory... then try running the game. If it still crashes, then move those ones back, and the ones you left behind the first time out...
This way you are only testing so many at once.
Of course it is possible that you have several bad girl files... also check your items files if you have custom ones. and any other custom XML type files you may have.
I would normally ask for the logfile, but I don't know the save game system that well to be honest. Just one more thing to look into.
I appreciate that.
I actually did find the issue, and since it doesn't seem to be a bug, as much as a need for updating packs, I'll give voice to it here: It seems that some of the random girl packs I had were what was bugging the game out.
I checked this out originally, but there was an old config file that somehow got transported to the new system folder, and that was also causing it to crash. When I figured that out, and fixed the problem, it crashed on loading the random girl packs. I removed them, and the game loaded fine.
I tested it also, to see if that's indeed what it was. Started two games, and bought a couple slaves: I one game, I bought only the unique slaves, and in the other, I only bought random. The random girls game crashed, but the unique girls game loaded properly.
Then, I removed those files once more, and tried the same test once again, this time using the remaining random girl files. Both games loaded as they should. Thus, the bug was not with the game itself, but rather something in the .rgirlsx file.
I did have a suggestion, and it may already be possible to do, actually... Is there a way we can add a line to .girlsx and .rgirlsx files that the program will not read, but which will credit the pack creator? It occurred to me that this would be an excellent way to keep straight the GP creators, without needing to archive all the GPs or maintain a list, or some other such nonsense.