Sorry I have not been active on this forum recently, but I have been very active in fixing Star Explorers. All the game breaking issues, like the pointer error and the database problems, arise from a series of memory leaks. Each time you load a new level (landing on planets etc...) a little more memory gets used up by the game. Eventually, it will reach a level where the game will crash or show some kind of errors. I have been tracking down and closing all the leaks, but there is at least one more to deal with.
For now, if you play, the best thing to do would be to save and restart the game after every few planets. This should reset the memory used by the game and avert errors for the time being. My advice would be to wait until the next version if you are not into frustration :)
Normally, the game engine handles memory automatically. However, the way I programmed Star Explorers to have randomly generated content on each planet, resulted in a few areas that do not get cleared out with each level load command. As a result, memory usage builds up slowly over time, and results in the crashes / problems. It is easy to fix, but somewhat time consuming since I have to track down each game object and plug the hole, so to speak.
Again, I thank everyone for their patience. Once this hurdle is overcome, Star Explorers should be a stable game on which I can build more and more content and improvements until it is ready for a full release. Once the final leak(s) are plugged, I will release a beta version for testing, as well as testing it myself. I hope to have the Beta ready by next weekend, then after a week or so of testing, I can change it to the default version.