The game randomly freezes in live mode on my system:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+
2x NVidia GeForce 8800 GT
4GB RAM
Windows XP

According to Everest Ultimate Edition, all temperatures are normal.
The Sims 2 and other 3d games, for example Far Cry 2, run fine.

I tried to solve the problem with the Dual Core optimizer (version 1.1.4) that was mentioned in post #12. I never used that tool before so perhaps nOOb-me did something wrong: I started the game up to the neighbourhood view, went back to windows, unchecked one core for the TS3.exe process in windows task manager and went back to the game. It froze even faster than it used to while running at two cores.
Disabling SLI mode didn't change anything either.

Can either of you provide any suggestions what to try next?