Good news! I tried again this morning and I seemed to be able play for > 15 seconds. I'll call that fixed/success and chalk the wierdness up to my system being just as excited as I am. Mine is one of the launch PS3's, just in case anyone else is having the problem.

Thanks for the replies.

Just wondering if anyone else had problems. The game froze for me during install, so I rebooted & got to an opener. The game froze there. I rebooted again, and deleted the game + savegame (and some other stuff to make sure my HDD wasn't full). The next reinstall went smoothly & I bypassed the beginning bit to a playable piece. At which point, the game froze. It freezes there consistently.

The weird thing is, the audio still works. The PS button doesn't (I can hold it down long enough to turn off the controller). None of my inputs seem to do anything. I also tried warhawk to be sure it wasn't my PS3, and that was workinging in online play.

1) I hope you don't consider this post a spoiler ... because I only gave away about 2 seconds of game play (I can't get past that).

2) There was some other guy that posted about the game freezing during saving, but he got locked. If you do lock this topic, can you please tell me why? I don't mean to slam Rockstar on their glory day... I just want some troubleshooting advice so I can play, too.

Thanks