When you run the M&B launcher (not cRPG launcher) then go to 'configure' then 'video' and untick 'load textures on demand'.
This helped for me to get rid of freezes and random fps drops.
The problem with load textures on demand is if you are in the middle of a game and need to load a texture, you get a huge 1-3 second freeze when you encouter a new texture....which is what the OP is likely referring to.
Its a pain in the ass but try playing with your texture QUALITY % instead. Drop it by 5% every time until you can get cRPG to run without crashing on startup. After cRPG added all the new shitty turkish crap models, I had to lower my quality to 90% in order to NOT have to use 'load textures on demand'.
Warband in general just has very poor configuration options. Even if you tell the game to use ALOT of video memory, it doesnt. I've tried about every combination in the rgl_config.txt for video memory and nothing helped but lowering the texture quality %. (My video card has 2GB of memory)
