hello @MapperKnime,
that’s for sure quite a change! Hope that besides this freezing you are enjoying new KNIME features. And regarding freezing is there anything specific to your workspace location? What OS are you running?
If I were you I would try following things. New workspace and/or starting KNIME with -clean parameter (see here). If there’s no change and KNIME is still freezing my next step would be to reinstall KNIME. But probably before that (or even first thing) would be to check KNIME log files after KNIME gets stuck next time. One log is located at ...\knime-workspace\.metadata and another one at ...knime-workspace\.metadata\knime. Make sure to set KNIME log level to DEBUG to get maximum information into KNIME. You can share logs here as well and someone will take a look 
Just please make sure you exclude sensitive data from it, if any.
Br,
Ivan