I can't say that's a common issue. Could you post your debug.err file here (located in the GCII directory) after you're able to reproduce this problem? You could also send that in to support@stardock.com with a reference to this thread.

-Mike
[Stardock Support]

Yea I've had this too
But it only happened when I saved a ship I built from the New (as opposed to the upgrade) under the same name of another ship from another game (ex: I just finished a game where I had a ship "Little Bitch". When I tried to save in another game another ship called by the same name, it crashed)
I dunno if that's the way to reproduce, but it's the only way I've had crashes when saving a ship design

I had this previous to 1.0X patch. I attributed it the smoke pouring off my video card. No issues since the patch.

Me too, as soon as I updated started having trouble

Well, good news for me is that I have not had the bug again lately, although I'm being careful to get rid of the blinking cursor before saving.

this is easy to reproduce. play a game, design ships give them your usual names. then, the next game you play, do the same thing, ie use those names that you usually always give to your ships. if the name has already been used in a past game and GPF. i keep telling myself to lower the autosave delay so i can recover with the least loss and i keep forgetting to do that.

this just happened recently, and went to the user data folder (my docs/my games/galciv2) to delete the custom ships file.. reloaded my autosave, and all the files re-appeared, so i'm guessing the ships are also stored in the save.

therefore to get rid of this problem, delete your ship files, start a new game, and remember to delete your old ship designs instead of just rendering them obsolete