Hello, Wishgranter,
After many more trials, I think I’ve isolated the problem to the distortion model. Anything but ‘Brown3’ will reliably crash RC in this set of project files.
The good news is that with Brown3 I’m at least able to complete alignment!
To answer your question, yes, I have been deleting all components from the scene – and tried with only the largest component as well. Both variants reliably crashed.