User Interface - Stalls upon loading campaigns

It still puzzles me exactly why the game is so finicky about some aspects of the GUI's (interfaces) and loading a campaign up. I thought it had something to do with alphas bleeding over into other parts, but I just used a totally vanilla interface set - then pasted over a test sample onto stratpage01.tga - and it stalls out again right at the last second as it's loading a campaign. These are really irritating too - as you have to ctrl-alt-del to get the task manager to come up, and it's usually very slow, hogging your resources, and then you finally can shut rome.exe down that way. I wish it just CTD'd honestly with this problem.

So I'm wondering if anyone knows what sets it off like this. What causes the problem - or maybe what should I avoid when altering the GUI's?

Silly question of me but... were you testing this out with vanilla 1.5?

I was editing EB files - but they were vanilla files when I started, the GUI ones. I think it is a problem that runs from 1.2 to 1.5 as I've had exactly the same issues with both builds. I'm sure it has to do with editing the GUI tga's themselves though and I initially thought it was the alphas bleeding over into each other or something like that, but now I'm not so sure, and think it could be related to changes made on the RGB layers. I don't know how the game "interprets" these files though, so when I want to make alpha changes, I'm terrified to make them unless it's very tiny. I've worked on these GUI's a lot (doing the eastern, campaignmap-barb, and carthaginian ones for EB, and doing a roman one now), but I still haven't been able to isolate what is causing the problem - though I have been able to get around it every time eventually.

Maybe the TGAs have to be in 24-bit format? I'm not sure about this, but I distinctly remember them having to be 24-bit for something in RTW... Ah yes, it was for Alpaca's height generator program, before its fix in 1.5/1.6, where the map TGAs had to be in 24-bit format or they wouldn't work. But if you replaced them with vanilla GUI files... hmm, then I don't know. But I do recommend trying all new modding additions on a vanilla copy each time, as that helps isolate the problem... although you probably know all this far better than I.