What a wonderful contribution to the Factorio map world! Good work! This should be a consideration for a Tutorial ending complete with the prologue.
Runs fine on my machine: i7-950 @ 3.07Ghz, Win10 Pro 64bit, GTX 970 Video, 12G Ram

Thanks to all for the advice and help. If anyone else experiences a problem like this, here is what I did to resolve the issue. The blueprint file was indeed causing the crashes. However, it wasn't the whole file but a single blueprint within the whole. I can only guess that an interrupted copy and ...

@ Dalestan
renaming the blueprint-storage.dat worked.
however, I now have no blueprints....
I'm uploading the blueprint file now

@TruePikachu
why kudos on tick 2?

@ Dalestan
renaming the blueprint-storage.dat worked.
however, I now have no blueprints.... have I lost them all or?...

First, multiplayer game works fine for me. I can join any game with reasonable ping. Second, no mods are on my machine. I like playing the vanilla version just fine. Now the problem: I start the game, using menu hit play, new game, play. No enhancement, no changes, no adjustments, just a normal game...