I also have this problem! Right now one of my characters cannot get into the First Contact Day event at all without freezing. It happens randomly with the other characters.
This has nothing to do with the problem. After one of these "patches" alt-tabbing ceased to work. If I'm playing the game and any Windows alert comes up that counts as alt-tabbing and my game will freeze.
Nope it just kicked me out after I played the CC event. I'm in Chicago. Now the login server won't respond after I tried to login again. So we are back to the same problems like last weekend.
I finally completed it once after all the disconnects, crashes, & lag 6 hours later. I couldn't locate the error log but that sounds like it may be that. Intel Core i5-2500K, 8gb RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti, Windows 7 Ultimate Did the new patch make it worse?
when I tried to go to DS9 my game crashed I hope they will extend this event an entire week if it gets fixed. If not just give us the ship as a C-Store promotion.