It's not a deal breaker but it is a concern to me.

As I'm playing the game it will freeze for about 5 to 10 seconds. When the video freezes the music will continue for about 3 seconds, then it too will stop.

Then it will just start up again with no problem.

It does this about every 5 or 10 minutes. It's annoying, but I haven't found any solutions on the forums regarding this problem specifically. It seems like everyone is having problems related to a Vista installation.

Any Ideas for this?

Also, I'm using the mobo's onboard sound system. First machine I've ever done that with, but I'm out of slots on my mobo.

My war machine:

AMD FX64 "San Diego" 4000+
Asus A8N32 Sli-Deluxe
(realtek AC97 Audio driver 5.10.0.5900 dated 8/19/05)
2 Gb Ram
eVga Nvidia 8800 GTX
(driver date 6/29/07)
Ageia PhysX card
(driver date 6/22/07)
Windows XP (fully updated)

Problem Resolved...

Nvidia driver 162.18 is buggy when it comes to video games.

After a call to eVga support I stripped out all of the bad (latest) driver and installed an older more stable driver for my setup (158.22).

No crashes. No hangs.