If you can figure this out please post it here - I am doing some experiments getting Freelancer to run on an Android ARM tablet via QEMU, and one approach I tested runs into what I suspect is a similar timeout issue.

The really peculiar part is my "timeout" happens before it reaches the Main Menu - before selecting either single or multiplayer. I suspect this reveals something about the architecture of the game as a whole in that it may treat single player as a sort of in-process "server".

To be more precise, I get the same error you normally get when the FL Account ID in the registry is missing or corrupt when you try to connect to a multiplayer server - except I get it before the main menu loads. It takes ~30 minutes to get to the error from the full-screen "Freelancer" splash image. The amount of time it takes is why I suspect its some kind of internal timeout. Clicking OK just exits the game...

Yes, I know 30 minutes to start FL is unacceptable but this is a research project.

Looks like SP has a one-minute timeout for the server to perform an update (MP is five seconds). The one you're seeing is to load the save games. Here's a patch to remove those timeouts, letting it take as long as it needs.