A little extra information:
- The game did eventually load after 3 and a half hours. After exiting and restarting, it again hung at 22% (Loading Teams).
- The problem seems to have something to do with the pictures in my "images" directory. If that directory is emptied, the game will pause at the Loading Teams message for about 30 seconds (much longer than OOTP 8, incidentally) and then proceed normally.
- Turning off Facegen has no effect. Neither do either of the Facegen troubleshooting modes.
- Disabling my virus checker has no effect.
- OOTP 9 is utilizing 99% of my CPU resources while it's hung like this.