I tremendously appreciate all of the input. First, I think the third post is a little confused. It's not where you kill the monster. It's after that, after the part where you slide down a ramp, jump over a gap, shoot a second sea creature, shoot the rope securing the portolius (blocking the second sea creature), shoot the rope securing a second portolis, climb the second portolis to the rope, and swing on the rope and jump to the alcove with the lever and door. At this point, I pull the lever and the door opens. When I enter the door, it freezes.
I have tried two things. First, when I load up the game again, I go into resume game and I start right at the lever (which is a checkpoint). I pull the lever and again it freezes when I try to walk into the corridor. I also tried loading from my last save file, which was saved at the prior checkpoint (right before you use the grapple to jump the gap and then slide down and escape the second sea creature). When I made it back up to the lever and tried walking into the corridor, it froze again. And as I mentioned in my last post, I have tried two completely different copies of Tomb Raider, and there is no difference--it still freezes.
As for the poster who thinks it may be a hardware problem, it's hard to envision how a hardware problem would cause the game to freeze in always the same location, but I could be wrong. As for whether it could be a corrupt save file, I will try saving it again to a new slot, but as I noted above, I've also tried the resume command (which loads me exactly at the lever, unlike the save file, which loads me at the previous checkpoint).
If anyone else has any suggestions, they would be greatly appreciated.
