After fumbling around a bit I finally started my first serious attempt at a full play-through of the game.  After a few hours of poking and prodding, unfortunately I'm not sure which turn, I got the greyed out turn button I've read about.  I saved the game, then exited out and restarted.  the game came up to the creating world message and just hung there.  I could not get off that screen by any method.  Ctrl-alt-del, alt-tab, alt-enter, alt-f4, nothing worked, though the mouse pointer still responded.  I wound up having to hard boot to bring it back up.  I've tested a couple more times and verified this save file always results in that crash.

Files below.  I'm not sure whether they correspond to the session with the stuck button or the session(s) that crashed, but the timestamps are all in the right neighborhood for either.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6056455/debug.err
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6056455/DxDiag.txt
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6056455/Test%20Game%201.EleSav
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6056455/Elemental0_299-2010-04-11T03-01-34-578.zip