Playing vanilla JA2, got the Bug Hunt quest in Drassen, cleared out the mine - killed all the bugs and Queen - but now the game is fatally hung.

i can't get out!

I take my squad to the entrance area of the Creature Lair sector, click for the exit box and the message comes up "travel to surface Y/N" - but then it locks up tight.

I tried sending another Merc down to test something and this happened:

i started from the save immediately after I had killed the Queen Bug - my entire Bug Hunt squad is in that chamber with the eggs and dead queen.

i send my merc down to level 2 and all the exit options work normally for him.

Back on level 3, I move my Player Character out of the egg chamber - not to the exit area yet - and then I go up to level 2 and move my Rescue Merc to an exit to go DOWN and up comes the "Travel to Surface" button and the game locks!

Anyone have any clues or suggestions?

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Update:

Found a solution of sorts which i'll post here if anyone else gets trapped.

Again, I went back to the save just before killing the Queen Bug. I loaded up one merc with grenades and elixer, and sent the rest of the squad out of the sector. Since all other bugs were dead and I wasn't yet in combat mode with the Queen bug, this all worked fine.

Grenade-merc enters the Queen's boudoir and lobs bon-bons at her until she expires.

I check on the rest of the squad in the next sector and sure enough they can exit to the surface normally - hurrah!

SAVE GAME!

Back in the lair, though, the hang problem persists - can't get my guy outta there.

So instead i fire him. I'll rehire him again later.

So the only problems with this "fix" are that i can't send anyone down to the lair now - i can go down into the mine just fine but anyone going down the bug-hole to level 2 causes the dreaded lock up.

So I have to use JAPE to magically create the Jelly my squaddies have earned.

On the whole, very frustrating and if it turns out this causes problems later (I haven't liberated Tixa yet) I'll be extremely annoyed.