This is something which happened to me twice yesterday, and today I caught it in the act!
I've got a dual screen setup and like to watch Let's Plays and the like on my other screen when playing. The game hangs when zooming in a little too far (when ships resolve from strategic icons to actual ships), which makes me generally avoid zooming in; but of course, I'm forever zooming slighty too far for precise control, causing these lockups. What I noticed was that when this hanging happened, the video on my youtube tab would also often freeze. The audio would still be playing, and when the lockup passed the video would continue in sync with the audio again just fine.
Now usually, when zooming in the game hangs for about 5-10 seconds, but occasionally longer. When it's longer, everything becomes extreme sluggish or completely unresponsive, including Ctrl-Shift-Esc and Ctrl-Alt-Del.
When it happened to me today (while watching Galactic Civilizations III Dev Stream - February 20, ironically, where the devs are talking about cutting gigs from the memory usage) it took about 20 seconds for the task manager to appear, and here's what I saw:
Normally a chrome vid tab will take up about 200mb
Rather than end the process, I decided to let it go on to see what would happen, here it is about 25 seconds later:
As you can see, GalCiv's own memory usage dropped considerably, while the Youtube tab's ballooned. During this entire time the audio of the youtube vid was playing just fine, but the video was hanging; GalCiv was unresponsive.
This continued for maybe a minute, until the video maxed out mem usage at ~2.7gb, then crashed.
Then memory usage returned to normal levels:
After that, everything returned to normal. Better than normal, in fact, GalCiv was running almost completely smooth, without even slowing down significantly when I zoomed in or out:
" href="http://i.imgur.com/iKCe2aE.webm">http://i.imgur.com/iKCe2aE.webm
That's actually quite impressive, as it's turn 153 in a medium galaxy, with 9 Major races and 4 minor, and almost the entire map visible.
Of course, this problem may be specific to my hardware, so here are my general Specs:
ASUS N76V laptop
Windows 7 Home Premium 64, SP1
Intel I7 - 3610QM
8gb mem
Nvidia GeForce GT 650M 2gb - secondary Intel HD Graphics 4000 (both the game and Chrome are set to run on the GeForce card)
And DxDiag is here if desired:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/45479330/DxDiag.txt
