I don't know if it is the same problem but when I exit the game I have a black screen with the game's mouse pointer in the middle. It takes forever to go back to the desktop. I always tought it has something to do with caching of textures or game data because it always happens when I exit the game after going to the fleet and during the "black screen" my hard drive spins a lot. Like the game was unloading all the textures it loaded from the fleet... I'm not sure if it's because of my computer having only 4 gig of RAM or because I run the game under Windows 8 beta but to exit this "black screen" I hit ALT-TAB and then the the Windows key on my keyboard and I get back to the start screen. Hope it helped Dooz