I'm glad this is solved! It was quite a puzzle. Here's a little background info to explain why it was behaving the way it was:
As all the content creators will know, RealFlight generates .dds files from the original .tgas. If a .dds already exists for a source .tga, the way RealFlight determines if it is current or needs to be regenerated is by comparing the dates of the two files. If the .tga is newer, then obviously it has been modified since the .dds was last generated, so the latter should be updated.
In this particular case, the time on abaser's computer was about one day fast. It caused no problems for him. But when he shared an EA and others imported it, their computer generated a .dds with the current,
correct time stamp on their machine, and that was always some number of hours behind the timestamp on abaser's original .tgas. So they were always out of date. And RF checks those at a number of points along the way when loading a vehicle. That's why it kept generating and regenerating the diffuse and spec map .dds files.
Eventually it would get through all the points where it performs that check and successfully load the vehicle. But the .dds files were still technically out of date, despite actually being correct. So the same thing would happen each time the vehicle was loaded. (The editor, by virtue of what it does and how it works, probably ends up doing that check a bunch more times than a regular load, eventually causing a black hole and a crash.
)
I could not reproduce the issue here, which made it pretty tricky to figure out. But I was always looking at it more than 24 hours after the original upload, at which point the .tga dates were no longer in the future. And when abaser uploaded a newer beta to see if it fixed anything, it restarted that "clock", so people had the same problems all over again when by that point the old one actually would have behaved normally.
That's also why somebody else reexporting the .tgas without making any changes to them magically made things work. They simply didn't have a timestamp from the future.
Phew! That was a fun one... ?