hummmm. does somthing like this happen when you are not on that misson. this sounds like the card over heated to me. i also dont know all that much about that card as i like ati better.

try this
just fly around for a wile if it frezzes up then your card is ovver heating
run a vires scan.( you never know)
get new drivers or if you have the newist drivers then roll them back to your old ones.



later


p.s dont look behind u

geforce drivers just have a tendancy to corrupt themselves on crashing - you might try an earlier save game(these can become corrupted),the freelancer patch v1.1 or latest SDK(unsure if SDK will make your saved games unusable) to fix the crashing,or even a directx update(drastic).

*a few "simple" tips for reinstalling geforce/videocard drivers
1.get driver cleaner or something similar,these are video-card driver cleaners that will delete registry entries & driver files that uninstall misses, _you should uninstall first before using these_
2.its faster(and less of a pain)to change the video adapter in display settings to a default VGA driver 1st then uninstall the nvidia drivers through the control panel then it is to uninstall the drivers,restart,install the VGA driver,restart,& reinstall geforce.
step#; 1.open display settings 2.select adapter 3.click 'change adapter' and select the second option(display list) 4.enable "show all hardware" & for manufacturers select 'standard display types',select one of the five listed(i use the first one,they should all work but i'm not sure about XGA) and install it - now your drivers have been swapped out.Now uninstall the nvidia driver through control panel add/remove,run the cleaner(s) & restart.
if everything worked properly you should now have a very ugly low res display that is the perfect base to install your uncorrupted geforce drivers over.