I've also been having freezing issues for many months. Only using Firestorm. It has definitely improved, means, in the past the viewer would often hang up to 1-2 minutes, whereas nowadays it freezes mostly for ~10-20 seconds. Nowadays also the freezes only seem to happen when opening profiles (randomly).
Just like with the original poster, freeze may happen in viewer instance 1, and viewer instance 2 just keeps behaving normally.