There is some really funky timing problem going on here. The file itself does not appear to have any problems (other than the same old mutations details overflow). I can load your sim just fine when I step through the load in VB or when I put a delay in the Load Robot loop. But when I try to load it in an exe, it hangs for a long time then gives an overflow which I cannot reproduce when running in VB, but it happens every time when running in the exe. Something somewhere in the code is timing dependent (perhaps the VB runtime I/O routines) and the overhead of running within VB is masking the problem or there is some functionality difference in VB between the compiled code it generates and the VB interpreter. Either way, this makes the crash/hang making it really hard to debug.
I'll keep after this. A few things:
1) I will try to drop 2.42.4 later today. One thing to be aware of is that a sim saved with a pre 2.42.4 version may still have some small isuses when loaded in 2.42.4 because of the way I deal with the pre 2.42.4 mutation details overflow. In short, for robots saved pre 2.42.4 that have greater than 2^15 bytes worth of mutatuions details, the robot properties in the sim file that come after the mutations details will be defaulted as follows:
.Mutables.Mutations = False
For t = 0 To 20
.Mutables.Mean(t) = 0
.Mutables.StdDev(t) = 0
Next t
.Mutables.CopyErrorWhatToChange = 1
.Mutables.PointWhatToChange = 1
.View = True
.NewMove = False
So, to the extent these per-bot settings impact the simulation, non-intuitive behavior can occur. That said though, old sims should always load in 2.42.4 so there is something strange going on with your saved sim file.
2) I have added a new 'Save Simulation Without Mutations' menu option which will save sim files without all the mutation details strings, which for long running evo sims are by far the largest portion of the sim file. This should allow for saving such sims in a more compact format for uploading, etc. (The sim you posted is 38Mb with mutation detials and 8Mb without).