I think I may have found at least one reason for the freeze-ups. A bot was sending me a file through DCC, then about halfway through, my comp freezes up, then reboots itself. Right after it restarted, an alert from PC-Cillin, showed that a trojan called IRC.Backdoor.Flood or something like that had been detected and removed. I read up on it, and it said that it could be used for denial-of-service attacks and channel flooding...that would explain the freeze ups and connection losses.
