I' ve been playing piratez since the non-extended version, and never got a crash with autosave on, i used it a very few times, peraphs it might have to do with something conflicting such feature, or a bug in openxcom extended executable?
Just watched (quickly) some more of DracoGriffin playthrough, i noticed that the research topic "school graduation" is unlocked after research on "advanced chemistry", but the school thing seems already been unlocked previously, please Dioxine may you double check? Also there is a typo on the acid grenade bootipedia description (loose instead of lose)
Edit: episode is 35, mod version is 0.96