Anyone hard locking when loading, where you can see the GGG gears logo grinding to a halt, you might be able to hear sound, but you can't CTRL+ALT+DEL, and the system is unresponsive - this is a problem that has carried over from Path of Exile 1. Turn off multithreading in the options, you'll be down to 1 CPU but it should stop the system locking up. Alternatively, try "BES CPU Limiter" and set the PoE.exe to use 98% of the CPU, so if it does lock it allows you to hopefully be able to CTRL+ALT+DEL without having to hard-restart the system.