when I got this error, it was because of an incorrectly hooked up texture(s).
The way I got this problem was that I had resized several meshes to be smaller (new cruisers/frigates anyone?). However, I hadn't done anything with the skins.
So, I resized the textures to match the resizing of the meshes, and boom it loads. Now I have a number of other problems that are all texture-related.
Note that I am running the v1.03 Entrenchment dev .exe with this.