Since Demigod's release, (don't remember it happening in beta, but maybe I was just lucky), I've been having the most insanely annoying problem.. it seemed largely (but not entirely) fixed in the last beta release, but this beta release seems to be just as bad as before.

Basically, in the menus, it will randomly just freeze.. sort of.  The background clouds will freeze, the sound will sometimes play for a short while, or sometimes do this immediately, but soon it gets stuck in a 1-second sound loop.  The mouse cursor still moves, but nothing else responds.  It stays this way for about a minute, then just continues like nothing was wrong.

It does this randomly.. sometimes it'll go minutes without doing it, sometimes it will freeze for 60ish seconds, be good for 3, then freeze again for another minute... it's really annoying, wastes a LOT of time.

It does this in the menu screens and lobbies, but once I get to the loading screen and in-game, I have no issues at all.

I have Vista 64, 8GB of memory (corsair), a quad-core 2.83GHz intel processor, an nvidia geForce 9800 GX2, and a PCI-E SB X-Fi Fatal1ty pro card... not overclocked, and alchemy isn't running on Demigod (not sure what sound system it uses... is it DirectSound?  SHOULD I use alchemy?  I haven't found any info on it, so haven't been doing it)

Any ideas?  Am I the only one this happens to?  Haven't found any reference to anything like this from anyone else..