I am at the point in the game where Odessa joins up before the party heads off to Sarady. With Ted in my party, the game freezes right when I enter Mt. Tigerwolf. I have tried system resets, soft resets, changing my formation around and saving it, gaining a level and then saving it, copying my file to another memory card and loading it, even rebuffing my disk all to no avail...So it would appear I have wasted 25 hours and getting my main character up to level 45 for naught. 
If anyone else reads this and is planning on going for a "perfect game file", I would highly recommend not saving it around this point in the game unless you want to collect all those urns again... 
I have had the disk since roughly when it was released here in the states and have beaten it a few times over the years since then. I can't remember if I ever saved it at my current point in the game before on a previous file in the past, but I certainly don't ever recall this happening...