I always thought it was due to this, it can take ages and seems to depend on the size of the game. the engine/game is probably being inefficient in some way as I'm pretty sure it doesnt use alot of processing power during it.
It somewhat reminds me of booting windows, takes forever for all my bloatware to load up but its hard to see what exactly is being the bottleneck.
Well, i have the same problem... not a crash but a long wait ( minutes ) for return to the start screen... and it is not a swap files problem since i have it dissable... and it is not rebellion specific since i have it with sins, ent or dip...
I would image this CPU time is being spent executing class destructors, freeing up memory, closing files, etc.
Just consider all the references to those thousands of strike craft, trade ships & mines that need to be closed.
Well, ready this, i have maybe a theory... it this happening only with x64 OS ( xp, vista, win7 ) ? If yes, it is a microsoft problem... If no, it is a Stardock problem
On windows x64 OS, when running a 32 bit application, WOW64 is used... since the first wow64 ( in 2005 with xp pro x64 ), there is a bug in it related to garbage collector ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_science) )... 32 bit software who use a GC can have problem on x64 windows OS... bug is well know from Microsoft ( http://zachsaw.blogspot.com/2010/11/wow64-bug-getthreadcontext-may-return.html , http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/windowscompatibility/thread/1558e9ca-8180-4633-a349-534e8d51cf3a )
So, let check if it is a Microsoft or Stardock problem :
I have the problem with win xp pro x64 ... if somebody have the problem with a 32 bit OS, it mean that it is a game issue... if everybody who have problem are using x64 bit OS and that nobody with win32 OS have the problem, it is possible that it is a microsoft bug... again, it is only a theory but it is worthy to check it