You may need to scroll up in the research screen. I personally have made the mistake of assuming that the technology the cursor was sitting on at the top of the screen was the simplest/quickest technology available, when in fact there were others up above that I needed to scroll up to see.
It's a "Games for Windows" convention, actually, in that Microsoft wants saved games to be associatied with specific user accounts and not considered part of the game/program installation. You can blame Stardock for following it, but this is the trend now, with more and more games placing their saves outside of their actual game directories.
It seems like game stability with Twilight of the Arnor is roughly equivalent to stability of the initially shipping Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords. They both contain a number of bugs and crashes, even though the crashes themselves may have different root causes or occur under different situations. I don't think it's unreasonable to hope that most of the game bugs would be squashed by now, but by the same token, when new content is added, new bugs get added. One could conceiva
In terms of the iconic representations when looking at ships or fleets... The icons appearing below each offensive technology are the corresponding defensive technologies.
I have observed this same problem. I had a game where the arrival of the Dread Lords caused a crash, forcing me to go back to an earlier auto save. I was then able to play for some time longer, after which point in time the Dread Lords arrived again (much later in the game), and the game again crashed almost immediately thereafter. I've since purged the save games, but I just wanted to advise that this problem is not isolated to a single user. This is with Twilight of the Arnor v1.96
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