Umm, I've experienced your problem by not having a good UO, I downloaded UO for a specific shard before and when using it with UO gateway to connect to shards it'd freeze when puttin in pass and creating characters. If that is the case go to ign.com and get and install the UO demo then use uogateway with that sucker. If you are using cd or that UO then I don't know what to tell you.