Well there' s the easy way and the hard way.
the easy way is to d/l the new drivers, and run the install. They should overwrite any problems you had in the old drivers...that's a should. This is the easy way.
Then you could try setting up an alternative fo rthe drivers.
Or you could simply uninstall the drivers...to do this however, you will have to revert to the generic Microsoft drivers, and then reinstall. This would be, obviously the hard way. If you really have problems uninstalling them, after reverting to the Microsoft generic drivers, you can manually uninstall your drivers by manually deleting them and all records of them, and then doing a complete install...not my first suggestion though.
Another thing to check. How many CD drives do you have...or DVD drives. Make sure the CD is in the same drive as you installed it in. I have had a CD read problem with XP (not ME but who knows, maybe it's similar) which will not read the CD (hence a game freeze of sorts) if the CD is not in the right drive. Another factor of this, is if the registry has been corrupted, and hence either the CD route is not found, OR, the CDkey is corrupted, in which case, a complete install reinstall might correct the problem, OR, it might not work unless you clean ALL records of SFC from your registry, a task not to be undertaken unless you KNOW what you are doing.
Finally, try the Beta Patch, if you haven't already (and can find it, I was lucky and got it early on) and see if that helps. The official patch should be out sometime this week which may help you.
Next, another thing you could try (much more effective in SFC 2 and OP) is to directly run it from the SFC3.exe file. Instead of using a shortcut, click on that directly. In addition, if you are having problems, it could be with the movies loading up first, you might want to move the movies out of the directory and save them somewhere and see if that speeds up the loading process or not.
Finally, make sure you have the updated official version of Direct X 9.0 if you are using Direct X 9 (I am not, so this is only heresay, so take it as that), and then, once again, apply the DX9 patch.
Hope something here can help you.