Well, it could have been just coincidence.
All I know is: the
very first time I reloaded a save game without exiting to the desktop, the game crashed a few seconds later. Other than that, the game has been
completely stable for me: no crashes at all, even though I normally play for several hours at a stretch.
So it seemed reasonable to me that the crash was related to reloading from inside the game, especially since I've seen a few other games that also had problems if you didn't exit and restart the game before loading a saved game.
If nobody else has ever had problems related to reloading saved games over top of a W&W game in progress, I guess it was just bad luck in my case.
