1st idea: try again (if you've tried just twice, you haven't tried enough)
2nd idea: wait longer (I get some interface freezes myself, but time heals many ails - as long as some lamps are still blinking, there's something going on)
3rd idea: do what Cm said and hope someone has better ideas than me. :P

I can say from my experience of taking a week to get the game to even be playable, it was the Newest Drivers causing the problem for me, so you might want to consider downgrading, especially if you have an ATI, I would go back to say 7.6 though 7.4 Omega ATI drivers are better.

Specs
 

I have a homebuilt PC. E6600 Dual-Core, 2 GB DDR RAM, nVidia 8800 GTX, Soundblaster Xi-Fi, no overclocking or mods, couple of 150 GB 10K RPM SATA drives, running XP.

I originally had older video drivers running about two revisions old, so after I upgraded I had the second post Beast crash. I'm not sure how long is too long to wait, I'm pretty sure I waited upwards of five minutes for the game to come back. I guess I can give it another shot and see if I can defeat BOTH beast and bug.