Wow. I can't believe it worked, but once I deleted those two DLC's the game worked fine. Now the problem is, what do I do with the two dlc's I bought that I can't really play with? Hopefully they'll be a patch/fix to make it more stable! Thanks for the help, I'll try installing the dlc's seperately and see which one causes the issues.
Installed Omega DLC, everything is working, it must be the Appearance DLC pack! Thanks! I hope it all gets fixed, I can't be the only one with this problem!
There's bound to be others who are still searching for a fix and ending up in this thread. This might not work for you but it could help. The problem in my case is probably the sound card / driver. The funny thing is that I recently installed ME2 for a fresh play through and found the game freezing during cutscenes and sometimes in-game but rarely or never in combat (don't remember). Ctrl+alt+del followed by Esc would get the game going again. I could play the game but it was a bit annoying at times.
Today I decided to play ME3 due to the epic combat. About 2 minutes into a savegame from the Omega reactor core, the moment a cutscene with the Cerberus general started, the game froze. How odd - the exact same problem in ME2 and ME3. I disabled my audio in the devices manager after bumping into this thread and finding confirmation that it could be audio related. Problem solved though it's nigh on impossible to play the game. I don't have time to work on this now so cannot post a proper solution but here's a lead for you chaps.
The strange thing about this is that I had a very similar problem back in 2013 with ME3. It manifested itself in a different way though. I can see from the savegames that I've clocked many hours of gameplay since posting this thread, the problem kind of stopped I think...
http://answers.ea.com/t5/Mass-Effect-3/ME3-PC-cutscene-freeze/m-p/1713367
Big bump but I've finally found a solution to this while trying to sort out a similar problem with another game.
Start msconfig, in the general tab select selective startup and unselect load startup items.
Go to services, click hide all Microsoft services, click enable all and then disable all. Apply and restart.
This is definitely a hardware issue, I've had no trouble playing ME3 on a 275GTX. On a 660GTX though the game would freeze all the time.
warning: If you go into msconfig and disable all services your pc will restart and you will not be able to enter your pin/password you will have to do a system restore to get your pc back online. Not a good idea to stop all services and save.
