It's all right man... I'll take that blasted program off your hands for ya...

And it's most likely not LightWave itself, it's that your comp can't handle something you did. Particle effects in particular take a mind-blowing amount of time and memory if your computer is a few years old- I can spend an hour waiting for a simple fire effect to run on Ray Dream. Moreover, the older a computer gets, the higher the odds that things will get corrupted from time to time. If your OS goes, everything goes- and there also may be your prob.
Send Lightwave to me and I'll see if it works over here, find solutions to locking up, etc. Nine times outta ten with graphics software, it's a slow CPU or old graphics card, but we'll see...
[email protected]