I made the changes as suggested, but then I got errors trying to load the saves. I didn't write down the error message. But just for grins I changed the names back, relaunched, and I'm able to get past the cut scenes where it was crashing before. I'm going to continue playing and see how far I can get. I can't imagine renaming, loading, renaming and loading again would have any effect on the bugs I was encountering, but you never know... Edit: was able to finish. Finally. 7 months after I started.