Okay, I think this is what I was thinking of when I posted that feature request to be able to not play demos automatically.
It seems that the issue here is that there was some kind of problem with a specific demo and it resulted in DROD crashing on the Change Location screen.
Unfortunately at this point it's not clear how to test for whatever underlying issue caused this - the specific demo having the problem is long gone.
If it's desired to solve this more broadly by introducing some sort of failsafe system, there's a crashing bug with demos in 5.1 that might be usable for testing:
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=44162&page=0#430337