Either solution does the trick - with max-texture-size=4096 everything loads fine with normal graphics settings, although performance is a little weak when zoomed out. It also loads without max-texture-size being changed if low res mode is used. That fits the VRAM hypothesis nicely - it's the same ...

Yeah, my guess is that some pathological behaviour in the driver is being triggered, especially in the older version - I tried running 'perf' while it was all hung up, and more than 95% of the CPU was being spent in the GL library. Of that, about half of it was spent in the kernel, zero-filling ...

Profiling determined that it was derping around in the nvidia GL libraries. I updated the nvidia drivers (from v.170 to v.311), and now it makes progress (although it still takes a few minutes to load).

I am experiencing the same error message on 32-bit Windows Vista SP2 with Factorio 0.10.8. About 2/3rds of the time I get the "couldn't load sprite" error, 1/3rd of the time I get a crash in d3d9.dll in between the first and second "created atlas" messages in the log.

Log after a d3d9 crash:
17:37 ...

When I try to load Factorio (10.8, Linux x86_64, Ubuntu 12.04) it appears to be stuck at the "Loading sprites" stage, except every few minutes either the % complete will tick upwards, or I'll get a console message with libpng whining about incorrect sRGB profiles. I take the latter to mean that it ...