Damn, ya know mine was fine for the first launch, prior launches after that I have the same problem. Perhaps Mediafire is better then?
I've now tired with all possible download medias and all are getting the same results. Getting to "Loading Textures" and boom, stops responding.
I tried redownloading and reinstalling from Mediafire. The loading time is begrudingly slow at a steady 0.20 fps. I'll try changing graphics settings in-game another module like Native and see if this fixes it like it did for Juan the Great.
Doing a FOR SCIENCE test. I have been able to fix the super slow loading textures portion with copying some files from the last beta. Now I just have to decipher which file(s) did the trick itself.
EDIT: Turns out that the last beta texture files work better to load quicker than the release version. So, if you have this super slow loading time issue.. copying the last beta textures overwriting the current ones should fix it. I can replicate this loading time scenario again and again and everytime with copying the textures over, B&I 3.0 loads in about 3 minutes with Use Pixel Shaders/Force Vertical Sync./Load Textures on Demand ON, and Large Address Aware enabled on mb_warband.exe.
Tl;dr version: please stand by for Parrot's hotfix.