I had the game freeze while attempting to place a merchant in my first city.  The custom (Elemental) mouse cursor was still visible, but nothing was responding.  Alt-Tab also did not respond.  Ctrl-Alt-Del allowed me to get out and returning to the screen gave me a black screen with only the mouse cursor responding.

I was able to capture a memory dump of the process before I force-killed it, but it's a tad large (172MB in .rar format).  I've posted the file in case it's useful:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7106056/MerchantFreeze/Elemental.rar

EDIT:

This freeze is reproducible from the below saved game.  In the starting city and in the default (starting) camera angle, build a merchant in the furthest bottom right tile.  Other tools seem to work fine, but that tile always causes a freeze from this saved game.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7106056/MerchantFreeze/MerchantFreeze.EleSav