I'm stuck in a situation where I can travel to any other location, but not the Stronghold/Caed Nua.  If I do, the transition screen sticks forever, and if I click on it, I get a message that the application isn't responding.  The saved game is located at https://www.dropbox.com/s/dg33w51pabz88fk/d163aacc054d452d83ac1644b92af93d%2010854314%20StormwallGorge.savegame?dl=0, but also impacts older save games going quite far back.  Is there any way to recover this?  If not, thanks!

Can you by change upload your output log as well? I just tried the save game provided and transitioned to Caed Nua without any problems.

I have posted the requested link to https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/108957295/output_log.txt Thanks!

In taking a hint that something about my system may be triggering this, I set windows to only use 8 processing cores, and 16GB of ram, as I have 12 (hyperthreading) cores and 32GB of RAM.  This made no difference.  One thing that I do notice is that at about the time I would expect to enter the map, the screen very very briefly flashes.  Could the issue be related to the NVidia 970 graphics card?

I very much doubt your core-count has much to do with it, unless one of them would be faulty - but that would likely cause different issues.

The short flashing could be simply the moment PoE locks up and becomes unresponsive.

Don't think area transition is linked to your GPU. Did you consider checking the installation through Steam (or re-installing if using the GOG version)?

Maybe some files got corrupted.

I performed the file check, and it failed to validate the files.  I downgraded from the beta to GA code, and now things appear to be working properly.  Thanks all!