I played an entire game on the first 1.7 beta without any
significant problems. Last night on the new beta, about
half way through the game on a huge galaxy, tough, 2 AIs,
the game slowed way down in a hurry. I saved the game
and rebooted. This took a long time even after I had
quit the game (this part happens a lot).

After rebooting, I tried to load the last saved game. It
crashed. I tried two auto-saves and they crashed.

A save I had done an hour earlier did load ok and I am now
playing it. Hope I don't see the problem again.

A couple of trivial problems. When I went beyond basic logistics,
I still could not form fleets. A save and reload fixed this problem.
Also on the newest beta, I saw the old Ctrl-N, reset the "intellence"
in the debug.err. It went from 80 to 15. Most of the time it doesn't
do this. But I have seen it multiple times over many versions.