So in two games I've experienced this same minor problem, once as Vasari, once as Advent:

When researching the tech to unlock the first ability for whichever race's envoy the game minidumps on completion. Now for the weird part: reloading a save (auto- or otherwise) and playing from there results in a minidump on completion as usual. But loading at a point where the research wasn't yet started, or loading, stopping the research and waiting for a bit, avoided the minidump (one game I played until victory, the other is ongoing). In both these cases I restarted the research at a later point and it finished, no problem. Thus far no other tech has caused this - just the one that grants your envoy ships their first ability.
The workaround helps, and hopefully will help anyone else experiencing this, but obviously it'd be better if it didn't happen.