player placement freeze

I am trying to start a new game in 1.25, so I do a lot of generate games looking for a good start. About a half dozen or so startups go by getting slower on player placement until the game finally locks up and I have to ctrl-alt-del task manage to kill se5 not responding. Is this new to v1.25 or has anyone else noticed it ? I never had this problem before, but I just changed my anti-virus and firewall too so it might be an interaction with them that is the problem.