Getting rid of memory chrashes with CFF Explorer

[Ro6]

Does this speed up loading times at all?

No, it only prevents the game from running out of memory after which the game crashes. Most of the times this occurs for people who run the 4X mod which typically requires more data to be loaded in memory due to higher texture resolutions.
cff allows the game to run with more than the standard 2Gb of RAM (that is, if you have more RAM available in your pc)

To load the game faster minimizing the amount of textures, poses, models and mods may also help.

A SSD (solid state disk) helps speeding up loading times a lot :D