Suddenly Having Major Freeze-Up Problems!

The problem started late yesterday evening. I'll be going along just fine and suddenly my character, minion and any mobs on my screen freeze in place. Sometimes it's for 10 seconds; most of the time it lasts for at least 3 minutes. Obviously, this makes breaches, areas with high monster density and boss fights impossible.

I should also mention that ground effect motion keeps moving on my screen - for example: the aura circles under my character still show rotation and my lightning golem still looks glittery or w/e. I can still hit tab and open the large map view, open the menu to make changes, and open my inventory even when character motion is frozen. On the short-duration freezes I can and have hit a flask or two, kept clicking for totems and flame dash in an effort to back away to a clear spot to avoid dying with some success. But this problem is so bad the game is basically unplayable now. I can still play other online games, watch videos and everything else on my computer without any problems at all. The trouble is strictly in POE.

I hit my F1 and it doesn't appear to be a latency problem and the FPS aren't going flat-line or anything like that.
Attempted fixes I've tried include: Using the lowest graphics settings possible. Even trying DirectX 9 didn't help. I always played in Fullscreen mode, but earlier today while trying to get through the Belly of the Beast, the game suddenly switched over to Windowed mode all by itself in conjunction with yet another screen freeze, just as I tried to Alt-Tab out to close the POE window and restart the game. Seriously, WTF??!! Since when can the Display Mode setting change itself? I know... it sounds crazy but that's exactly what happened because I never, ever play in windowed mode and suddenly BAM! It's windowed.

Maybe the last patch did it, I don't know.
I've already checked my hardware, GFX card and everything on my end is fine. Can you guys please check into this problem? I'm so frustrated and fed up... I can't even get through an easy level 1 map now. If you need any specifics about my hardware or additional info, please ask. I'm using a single NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti card that is only about a year old and works fine for everything else - worked great for POE too until last night!

PS ~ I just tried to play again & I actually timed the freeze up. It lasted just OVER FIVE MINUTES this time, before suddenly trying to "catch up"! Of course, my character was dead again because I was in a low level map and eventually the mobs came looking for my character. :(
One other thing - my roommate was running an instance with me and he could still see my character moving on his computer, even though it still appeared to be frozen on mine, if I hit a motion key or my mouse button. He was having the same problem on his computer the other day, but not nearly as bad as what I'm dealing with. His seems to be working better now, but he has a better computer & GFX setup.

It's so bad that I can't even do my Elreon daily before I freeze. The quest timer keeps ticking down and now it's done. Most likely it will be like yesterday & it will fail again. Unless I get this resolved, I'll be quitting POE because trying to play is an exercise in frustration and a complete waste of time. There are other games like HOTS that I can play without any trouble at all.

Im having the same issue... The game completly freezes and it starts to not responding.

My son looked into it for me this morning. He ran a WinMTR report and found a huge packet loss occurring at a Comcast (relay) server in Sunnyvale, CA. Nothing we can do about that. Comcast isn't even my ISP. Resetting our modem and router seems to help a little bit & changing POE servers can help because the packets are routed differently. Also, there is a setting in the POE Options menu on the UI tab labeled "Networking Mode". The default is "Auto", which was apparently using Lockstep & causing freezing. By manually changing that setting to "Predictive", instead of freezing you get a rubber-banding effect during play. It's the lesser of two evils. Rubber-banding is as annoying as hell, but at least it increases your chances for character survive-ability!