I am running into an issue with the game freezing sporadically when entering of leaving a battle.
Freezing or
crashing? The crashing is occurring when too much RAM is being used, I've found. The game is an old 32-bit game with limited memory available to it. If you see your RAM usage increasing to the 900's or 1 GB, crashing is imminent. Basically, when the driver needs more memory to store textures or 3D models, etc., it sends a request to allocate that memory to the Operating System and the OS responds saying "no, you can't have any more than what I've already given you", then it crashes. I see spikes in RAM usage after battles until it normalizes and is probably why crashing frequently happens after them. You can monitor your memory/cache usage by turning on the Stats Overlay and/or Stats Titlebar options under Settings>Game Driver.
Try switching on and off different mods to see how it affects your memory usage. Sometimes the issue occurs with going over your texture cache limit. By default, that is set to 2GB and shouldn't be set any higher, but if you see the cache approaching that, again, start expecting crashing. Unfortunately the game (Aali) driver is not great at managing RAM or texture cache (cache is completely broken) either. Both issues are being looked at to see if they can be improved, but ultimately, newer mods are pushing the limits of what this old game can handle.