There is a bug very early in the game that prevents me from completing even the tutorials: upon targeting a ship or cargo crate, the game crashes.
Reports on the official forums are that there are codec issues or something, but posts date back to 2012/13, and most say that they're still playing on XP or Vista to boot.
Any help for a Win7 player with up-to-date drivers?

It really seems like 50% of all problems are due to codec packs.