Hmmm. Now you have me thinking about doing a fresh install of AH. The problem you mentioned seems related to the offline speed bug. When textures are preloading, they 're currupting something. In your case it caused a timeout. In my case it causes double speed planes offline. When you start the second time, you had no problem. The textures were already in video memory. When I start a second time, everything is fine. During preloading, the textures are over running a buffer. Its impossible to know what other side effects that could have.
Did you keep your settings folder?