Recently had trouble with crash on sim load, and found out the solution, so here it is and hope one day this helps someone.
My symptom was, always CTD during simulator start, at around 50-60% of the progress bar.
You might want to check for a corrupt or badly modified exe.xml. My suggestion is start with a clean exe.xml with only simconnect in its modules. Location and howto as stated in the below article:
In my case, the AFC_bridge software that comes with honeycomb had damaged my exe.xml. Once recreated, smooth start of the sim. Happy!
PS. @Asobo… you could have built a better error handling algorithm for this rather than bang!CTD
