When I enter the Goose and Fox, I can get a few steps in, and then the game freezes completely--I have to restart my computer. I tried reverting to a save game from before I ever entered Defiance Bay, but that didn't help--it still freezes the first time I enter G&F. I tried entering with a smaller party, and that didn't help either.

Has anyone else experienced this? Any ideas?

It's odd that it should crash in one particular place. Do you have any mods installed?

So... that brings up the next question: how does your computer stack up? If it's choking because of activity, something is wrong somewhere.

My computer's not that bad; it's not a serious gamer's computer, but it's not bad. I played PoE on it back when it first came out, and had no problems at all, and my computer performs just as well now as it did then.

However, you're probably right that a higher performing computer would help. After rolling back to the earlier 3.02 update, I also tried reducing the graphics to the lowest quality setting, and those two changes seem to have been enough to enable progress. Now, the computer still freezes when I enter Goose and Fox, but only for 30 seconds or so, and then it unfreezes. It freezes again every time I talk to someone, looping tiny segments of the background sound over and over, but again is able to unfreeze, eventually. And then after awhile it stopped freezing, as if it had successfully worked through its issues with the area. When I loaded up a save game later and re-entered, I had to go through that process all over again. But at least I can do the quests there, even if it's annoying.

The problem is definitely specific to Goose and Fox, though. I went all over the city and never had any trouble anywhere else.

It really does sound like RAM issue, but just to be on the safe side, I would also recommend checking status of your hard drive. (if you're unsure how to use it, feel free to ask) And if you'd like to be really sure, there's also this.

Thank you both for extremely helpful answers. :)

Chkdsk came back with no problems, and I'm always careful about eliminating background processes, so the really easy solutions are out. It hadn't initially occurred to me that computer performance could be the issue, since I played this game before on this computer, but maybe over the years I've accumulated some physical or informational sludge that is slowing things down.

I do only have 6 gigs of RAM, so I guess it wouldn't hurt to buy a little bit more RAM for dear ol' lappy, and ask my friendly local computer folks to blow the dust out of the insides while they're at it. Hopefully that will be enough.

Updating just in case others might search for something related to this topic:

Before buying more RAM I decided to uninstall and re-download the game, in case the problem was some kind of corruption in my game files. And it appears that it was: re-installing solved the Goose and Fox problem completely. Unfortunately, after doing that, there were now *new* buildings that had been fine before but that I was now unable to enter without the game crashing. Presumably the new download had also gotten corrupted somehow, just in different places.

I finally figured out how to get the "verify/repair" function in GOG Galaxy to work, so I could fix the corrupted parts without re-downloading the whole game, and since then everything's going smoothly. I think.