This was true on Monday and part of Tuesday when they were still using the beta servers and the pirates were trying to log in, but after tuesday stardock got their official servers operational and the update within impulse linked the game to log into the new servers leaving the pirates on the older servers.  The problems at the moment are that they are still playing catchup with server setup due to being black balled by gamestop last weekend.  This isnt to say that the coding of the UI in game is perfect as the impulse overlay has some issues.  Further the game uses P2P during setups and the network code needs a bit of tweeking in order to stabilize the connection issues occuring.  These will come in time (hopefully soon), but SD has done an excellent job keeping us informed.  They've even allowed some of the community help out in different ways which is what more companies should do rather than thinking they know everything and that the players are simply feeble ignorant kids who dont know what they are talking about.

Anyway, I've had some issues here and there, but for the most part I am able to connect and get a game up and running within a few tries (dictated by whether I get stuck with someone who is having problems or not).  Once connected, the game is a blast.

But yeah, I've gotten that crash several times myself.  It's only showed up since the latest patch, so something in there changed how the game executes and runs.  I typically only get it when I've had the game running for several hours and I try to alt tab out to change an mp3 or something.  Once I think it did just crash for no reason, just sitting in the lobby chatting.  Might be something to do with the impulse overlay interface.