guste: I considered using kram drivers, although I really wasn't sure the proper procedure for their use. I mean, that thread you linked to from xpmce was over 45 pages long! I imagine I could find what I need to know, but at what cost time-wise? So, you say that you have the same setup as me and yours is working well? Does that mean you have an ati x600 pro video card and an nforce4 motherboard? if so, which motherboard, and in what order did you install the drivers for it? I ask because now there's cat 5.5 cc and 5.5 wdm, and 9.08 mmc, not to mention the cat 5.3 display drivers which ArcCoyote recommends using, so which drivers are included in the kram pack, and what parts from the most recently available drivers should be installed overtop of it, and in what order? I read a few pages from that link you gave and I saw a lot of references to "upgrading this" or "replacing that" - if you have this same hardware config, I'd love to know what you've done and in what order you did it in order to get it working. I feel like I'm getting close to solving this.
to ArcCoyote: yet again more excellent suggestions, thank you. As per your suggestion I ran MCE in non-full-screen mode, and sure enough, the freeze also froze the mouse and keyboard, so as you asserted, it would appear more likely to be a hardware or driver issue rather than software. To further pursue that notion, I attempted to lower the process priority of ehrecvr from taskman but it was protected and would not let me alter it.
From my experience, freezing consistently while doing the same action is usually software or driver related, as opposed to the quantum fluctuations known to aflict RAM while being overclocked, causing completely random blue-screens. That being said, perhaps this problem is more along the lines of there being a fundamental problem with my particular video card that lays dormant until a particular command is issued, this command being issued by the driver, which is managed by the operating system, and called by MCE itself, and since MCE has such high priority, when it bocks waiting for a reply that never comes, the whole system blocks too, but that's just a for instance. I guess the only way we'll ever know this for sure is if I can manage to get those kram drivers working, or if tjpse don't work, then if I manage to get an identical replacement x600 video card in order to remove the video card itself as the source of the problem, but that last one will take some time, so for the immediate future, I'll await guste's response as to how to install the kram drivers and we'll see from there. I think i have a friend with the exact same x600 aiw as me, so I definately have the resources to pursue this thing to the bitter, bitter end if the kram installation doesn't go. thanks for the continued assistance guys. we'll get to the bottom of this.