Oh thank God it's not just me, I guess. Misery loves company.
Alienware laptop, 32 bit vista, 2 nVidia GeForce 7950 GTXs, drivers up to date. I get what appears to be a freeze but it's not; the program is STILL RUNNING, it's just a graphics freeze. If I'm patient holding down ctrl/alt/del I can get back out to open task manager, and have verified the game is running. Not only that, I can then alt tab back in and everything will be working again. Until the problem repeats itself.
I'll turn down the planet setting to high from highest when I get home, and maybe scale back everything else a notch as well. I did not notice this problem manifesting itself either in the tutorials or on small maps--is everyone else experience this problem also on a medium or large map?--and I don't think the problem has anything to do with what's actually on the screen at the time. Someone mentioned in a prior response that the game has frozen without looking at a planet or anything else--that's happened to me, too.
I hypothesize from the way the problem manifests itself that the game is loading textures and tracking things you'll be able to see soon (ie, you're phase jumping into a new system, or something's phase jumping into you) so that the textures aren't still loading by the time you can actually see them. That could just be a bullshit guess, but it freezes on me more frequently the more planets I could potentially zoom in to see--even if I'm zoomed all the way out and can only see the iconic representation of planets and ships. It also freezes right as a scout ship phase jumps to a new system (later in the game when there are more ships and facilities around, it freezes more and more frequently) and also right before a pirate armada phase jumps into one of my systems. Oh, and when I accepted an AI's diplomatic offer to share ship sight and planet sight? Game over. The program was still running, and I think there was still sound, but I couldn't hear it over my nVidia drivers' screaming.