Crashing/Freezing when trying to enter chat, just wondering by any chance you are using a non-US keyboard layout because Windows 7 isn’t natively letting you press the tilde key without holding it down? At the very least switching back to US keyboard and then rebinding change weapon key to something other than tilde fixed it for me. Seems every time I try using ’ key in chat it would crash it when I was not using the US Default keyboard.
At any rate, worth a look, maybe they’ll fix it some day without having to revert back.
As for the tilde key, it’s not a dead key thing, and it’s not the keyboard as vista and xp both work fine on the same computer so gave up trying to fix it.