I own a SB X-Fi card and am experiencing just the same thing, so its not the SB-Live! problem, people... it happened once or twice that the game did UNFREEZE after a few seconds, but 99% of the time it just remains frozen and i can hear things happening (with a usual crash ending everything)), its just that the video is like 2 frames violently fighting to show themselves.. as if the screen kept dividing into multiple fragments showing 1st frame, then the 2nd one then the 1st one and so on...
(oh and BTW: I dont get to see the task mgr, just the windows cursor)
My opinion: its the LockOn issue, not my HW issue.
Regards
Wretch