I can confirm it's not an issue with the video or audio drivers. I flashed the BIOS in an attempt to get rid of the freezes, too. But just asking in game, there's more than a handful of people complaining about the crashes that started happening after the patch and hotfix. I turned off the 'load textures on demand' setting and that fixed the issue with random FPS drops. The freezes and crashes are still there.
Running an i5 quad at 2.6.
A cheap nVidia 9800GT.
4GB RAM at 1600.
The HDD is a beast, though. Not quite sure what's up with this latest patch, but it's caused its fair share of problems.