OK, first of all, I have discovered that the with the exception of the bug with LBA 1 freezing when started for the second time in a row with VIDE-CDD.SYS, the other freezes I reported have more to do with external MIDI.
1. First, a non-freeze bug. The emulated AWE32 seems to operate in reverse. When I choose OPL3 in LBA 1 configuration, it uses external MIDI. When I choose MIDI, it uses the internal OPL emulation. I think it should be the other way around - MIDI choosing external MIDI and OPL3 choosing the internal OPL emulation.
2. If the game is set to external MIDI, it likes to freeze after or during loading speech file from the CD, especially if the CD driver used is not OAKCDROM.SYS. If the game is set to the internal OPL emulation, it works fine. However, if the external MIDI device is set to Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth, it will also work normaly. But anything else, such as BassMidi or VirtualMidiSynth will cause a freeze.
3. A more general MIDI bug - setting the AWE32 to an external MIDI deviceo ther than Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth will cause the emulator to get stuck when exited, and never really terminate, so you have to use Task Manager to forcibly terminate it.