Melvil
Super Duper Super Sweet
I replaced my DvD rom and magically most of my issues are gone. Apparently my loading issue was completely related to Securom not being compatible with my old DVD player (this game and Dragon Age both had issues with securom and my dvd player). The devs said they had some strange intentional game behavior for people who warez the game or use no-cd hacks, but it's sad for players like me who had a legit (Steam) copy and still had to upgrade my dvd player to use the game without issue.