Here are the steps that should reproduce it.

GNN informed me a new ship being built. So I click the GoTo button. I then enter the ShipBuilder as I had also just gotten a new tech a couple turns earlier. So I design a ship, choose a name and hit save and the popup (to enter a description) doesn't appear. Argggg. So I try again and no poup. Try several times to no avail.

So I finally exit and it takes me back to GNN news report. I close that and now I see that popup to enter the ship description. Looks like it basically popped "under" the GNN screen. So I fill it out in hopes it would save my ship and then the game crashed to desktop (most likely due to not being in the shipbuilding I'd guess).

So my guess the problem is that the ship builder popup to finalize your ship name and description needs to be made to always be on top of any other windows that might be open in the GalCiv 2 GUI.