I had my virtual memory minimum set to 100,000 Mb and my max to 700,000 mb at one point and I still experienced the same in game freeze. I can play for hours, then the game freezes and you can still hear music, if you are adept at blind mousing over buttons, you can even hear the game continuing behind the frozen screen.
I have now tried everything recommended by Stardock and by the community as a whole. I know the team is working on another big patch and I am sure they are hard at work fixing some of these issues.
The fresh install did not help any whatsoever. It should be noted I am experiencing this on Small and Tiny maps.
I tried the disabling of the firewall. Disabling all Dropbox/OneNote services. Disabling McAfee AntiVirus. I have updated my Intel driver to the top of the line driver, beyond what HP allows. I have literally done as much as humanly possible to get this game to work.
I am not concerned, I have a diversified portfolio of games I play, so it is not a big deal to me. I will await the dev team to handle it. They have been very quick to put out updates thus far and I look forward to other useful things such as the Steam Workshop. All the pretty ships ....