It does happen to others. I have this problem myself and know of at least one person. Just as you said the crash occurs when you leave the starport and the merchant quarter is loading. It doesn't matter if the game is patched to 1.0b or not, also the mods are not the problem. It appears that either some files in our particular versions are corrupted or it has something to do with the path you take in the game. Either way it's pretty annoying to have 33h of your life wasted just to see the error message.
