Came here to share a workaround I've stumbled into for my fellow Win7/8 users. I got curious and started ProcMon64 so I could get some info on what was happening up just before it froze... and it simply doesn't. Texture loading performance in general is also much better. Only god knows why it works, but I'm sure the devs would be very interested to know as I imagine other debugging tools running alongside it may also prevent replication of this show-stopper of a bug.
The default log size of ProcMon64 is something like 199 million entries which over a long playthrough is sure to eat up significant RAM, but if you lower it to the minimum 1 million entries it won't be so bad. I don't know if you can grab it by itself either but it's part of the System Internals Suite hosted on Microsoft somewhere, won't be hard to find if you don't already have it.
