Please open your debug.err file in notepad, and link the contents into a post here via pastebin. This will give us some technical information that can help troubleshoot your problem.

The file can be found in My Documents\My Games\Elemental

Be sure to copy the debug immediately after the error occurs; if you start the game again, the debug log will be erased and recreated for the new session.

Do you use a firewall like ZoneAlarm?  Each time Elemental updates, zonealarm considers it a new program and I have to give ZA permission to let Elemental proceed (yes, even for a SP game, Elemental is trying to connect to something).

I have to ctl-alt-del out and give ZA permission, then Elemental continues and starts up.

Dunno if that's your problem, but check if you have a firewall.

Were you using a custom map? I see you're at least using a custom faction, and the last part of the load it got through should have been followed by loading the in-game fonts and generating the map.

The game froze without freezing you say? I've noticed that sometimes after you finish a turn and click the next turn button, the game doesn't always go to the next turn. I have however found a fix for this, at least for my own issues with it. I go into the options and check the Auto-Turn box on if it happens to me, then I cycle through my units and have them guard, at which point the game then continues on to the next turn and I switch auto-turn back off. It happens rarely but since I can fix it on my own, it bothers me not. Also, if you have units on auto-explore, they sometimes get stuck and will not allow you to continue to the next turn, my above solution fixes that problem as well, just make them guard and re-initialize auto-explore the next turn. Hope that helps some.