Have you tried deleting anything the game has written to disk (save files, settings) prior to reinstalling?
Unless something is really going haywire when loading a save, that won’t normally corrupt any components of the game itself.

I’d rather suspect that the save had been corrupted to such an extent that nothing could be restored from it, causing the game to crash (possibly buffer overruns?). This, however, invites some very nasty breaches of security.