Ok, right out of the box and about 1 minute in to starting a project, I discovered an issue that makes Gstudio unusable. It occurs when adding a texture wad to my project, on doing so, it crashes. Any thoughts as to what the problem could be?

what version do you own??

I downloaded A8 and chose the free version.

which version number appers in you acklog or the starter window?
or you can look up in SED

I'm not sure what an acklog is...but in WED/help/"about wed" it says "Gamestudio Free 8.02/WED v6.95

Your problem is probably not an issue of your version number, but of your WAD file.

WED reads the WAD textures when you add it. If it is a wrong file format or has no correct WAD content, it reads nonsense data and that is likely to crash.

So first make sure that you created the WAD correctly. When 10000 people have no problems adding WAD files and only you have a problem, its obviously not a "bug" of the software. The principle of all software is: garbage in, crash out.

For learning the gamestudio basics, just start with the tutorial.

I was using the tutorial. I was following it when the problem occurred. I came to the step where I am supposed right click on "textures" and select "add wad". I chose the only wad available, the "standard wad" included with the program.

Ok, here is what I had to do. After poking around a bit, I wound up right clicking in the textures tab, selecting "save wad" and saved it as "default wad". I was then able to select this wad instead when right clicking on "textures" in the preset list. This did not reproduce the crash and seems to work fine, I just have to go and collect a bunch of textures to place in it. It seems my problem was in fact with the standard wad, included in the program, at least for me.

You might try to find sone wads on the internet....
Then dump them into your WAD folder...
From there you can add them through the texture manager...

On the other hand.... maybe you got a bad/corrupted 3dgs download...
In that case... try starting from scratch... this time just let the download finish before doing something else with the computer...
Never... ever... give up !
G'd luck...