the same thing happens to me...... I have almost the same system specs as you do...... I solved the crashing by using epsxe executor....... No more crashes..... It seems to me that the gui of epsxe crashes my system just like yours with everything frozen and I have to press reset on my system...... With executor, the epsxe gui doesn't open up so...the crashes don't occur...... As long as you don't have the epsxe gui, it doesn't crash...... So either use the epsxe executor or use epsxe from the command line.......