I think I may have found the problem... my anti-virus software's (avast! 4.8) web scanning module. I turned it off yesterday evening after reading about similar problems with McAfee's SiteAware and AVG's web scanner and have as of yet not encountered any freezes since. I'll continue doing so today to see if this situation persists.
I'm thinking it may either be the module itself or a conflict between it and my firewall (ZoneAlarm), because in ZA Program Control I saw that the web scanning thing wasn't completely OK'd by the firewall (it still had to ask me for permission upon trying to access the trusted zone).
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