TJWhitford: Edit: So... it is several hours later (of which I did take a break to eat while it was running so maybe an hour or so less), but it did indeed crash again.
Kezardin: Have you tried deleting all the files in the /temp and /cache folders ?
I'll try it out thanks!
Apparently though, the problem was just entering and leaving Mabbeth's place. When playing last night it'd freeze during the game every other hour (after autosaves, which made me shrug it) and it froze some 5+ times during her whole mage questline. So, I'll edit this to how it treats me later, but it's actually not so much a problem now. (Haha, just gotta figure out how to open the portal to get to the Buried Village)
Also, something that may be pointed out to some people, I'm running this on Win 7, and having it set up the way I do (as mentioned above), it's never crashed on exit... ever. So, that could be on the right track.
Thank you brother (Kezardin), I'll definitely edit this to how it goes later.
Edit: After 3 hours or so of gameplay it finally froze. Still no problems on exit. I dunno what's up with that, but it seems that series of hiccups was just Mabeth. Also, got past the town down unda.