Crashes when trying to load saved or new game

[yanamal]

Factorio crashes whenever I try to start a game. Everything works fine up to the point where the actual game loads, I see about a second of the game, then it crashes
This started suddenly: I played fora while, then I stopped for a few hours, then tried playing again and it won't work.

the debugger(MSVS 2010) shows this:
Unhandled exception at 0x016a37f9 in Factorio.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x0000000c.

This is on windows 7.

Things I've tried:
uninstalling/installing the game
deleting the player-data.json file
deleting the entire appdata folder and then unistalling/reinstalling
downloading the installer again for a fresh install

Things I haven't tried yet:
actually deleting the Factorio game folder before reinstall (presumably it's empty after uninstall)
not logging in after a reinstall

Shortly before this started, I did edit the player-data.json file to be able to skip that damned 3rd level. But then I played the 4th level fora while with no problems, I think even exiting and restarting the game at some point. I did notice that after I played, the file changed again (despite me not unlocking anything), I think the updater_token changed.

[yanamal]

Ah. what I hadn't tried was restarting my computer. That, of all things, helped the uncaught null pointer exception (ahem).