Most of these crashing issues tend to be due to graphics driver issues. Unfortunately they're hard to reproduce and hard to fix, either on your end (by updating or rolling back drivers), or on ours, by changing something in the OpenGL rendering code. They have plagued TG and many other applications off and on for a long time. *sigh*
As far as slow load/save, that sounds very strange. Despite what Klaus said, more complex cloud layers, etc. should not cause slowdown of load/save, at least as far as disk operations are concerned (the actual load/save part). If the preview is busy updating, then things could get slow, but that only begins for loading once the scene is *already loaded*, and for saving, if you are having CPU load issues due to preview update, you can just Pause the preview. But I suspect this was something else unusual happening because it sounds like it has resolved itself, at least partially.
Anyway suffice to say that when TG is saving, it mostly just writes a pretty simple XML file format, and this does not take much time. So I'm not sure what was going on, but hopefully it stays fixed. If it happens again I would suggest trying a test save on a local volume, not on the network, and see if that addresses it. If so it would appear to be something network-related, which will help us track it down if it's something TG could be handling better.
- Oshyan