It most probably is a memory or processor issue like Twan said.
There's quite a long wait for the map after you click the name when creating a new game.
If it takes so long to load that you think the game froze, I think you should just give up
, you could probably get it to load if you wait long enough, but hosting times will kill you eventually.
Thus spoke a man with 1.5 Gygabytes of DDRAM. (Only a meagre AMD Athlon 64bit 3000+ processor though
)