FF9 - Lock up in the world map (outside) problem

Hi everyone, I'm having a weird problem. I had to reformat my HD, so I reinstalled WinXP and the problem is occuring since. Before, I did not have any problems running FF9 on epsxe 1.5.2

The problem is when I go outside a town and walk on the world map or whatever it is called. After like 10-15 seconds, the screens locks up. I can still do alt-tab to finish the epsxe.exe process, so the computer doesn't crash at all, only epsxe. What is weird is I either tried epsxe 1.5.2 and 1.6.0 and the problem is there on the two versions. I even tried Pete's Soft GPU, OpenGL, OpenGL2 and DirectX plugins and with different configs, but it always does the lock up.

I haven't found any problem close to this one in the forums, so I don't know if it might be related to my computer's drivers...

Has anybody encountered this problem before?