I noticed this same thing yesterday.
I have been playing fine for 2 weeks. Then last night I got the latest updates (client now says 3.006). Now the game runs smoothly for a few feet (game distance) then it will just pause for about 30 seconds. Then the character will start walking again.
This happened in a battle too. I was fighting a rat, then the system did the weird pause and when it came back I was down to 2 hp and it froze again. When It unfroze I was in the death realm.
I have a P4 2.4, 512MB Ram and a GeForce 3 Ti 500.
I went into a few of my other games and didn\'t get the freezing issues.
I didn\'t have time to do any other troubleshooting.