So I found out how to use CTRL+N (couldn't find the correct keystroke right off) and discovered that if you use it a few times you end up getting passed thru the tech select, GNN, and lots of other dialogs repeatedly - seemingly for every "restart" you do. You even see dialogs for races you might've been near for any given "restart."

You end up having to click "done" a whole lot of times then once everything clears up it's a good idea to check your research, planet, etc to make sure they got set correctly at some point in the chain of carnage.

Eh, I last night I hit CTRL + N about 20 times til I got a galaxy I liked and I was kinda surprised that the game didn't crash due to the insane amount of windows and dialogs I had to back out of to finally be able to play.

This issue makes me want solid ESC key behavior even more. ESC should back you out of whatever window you're in and only open the options window if no other windows are open. This behavior doesn't seem to be consistent - sometimes it works that way, other times it takes you to options from a child window. Sometimes the only way out of a window or dialog is to explicitly click a button. It's kinda brutal since the behavior is inconsistent and not typical. I'm a slacker - I don't want to move the mouse to click a "done" or "cancel" button - I just want to hit ESC.
Because then this windows pile up wouldn't be so bad - I'd just hit ESC 30 times to clear everything up - but when this particular window pileup occurs you can only use ESC for a few of the dialogs - then you end up in a cycle of going in and out of the options screen and you never really get anywhere.