No, no Windows updates since 11/23 and no updates to the game either. It was just odd, several restarts of the game led to the same problem. But then it just worked. Everything worked beautifully the first time I finished ED, but this last time was painful.

I had even done a verification of all local files via the Steam interface and it was still crashing on transition, so I know for sure that I didn't just randomly have a corrupted file.