@Metallaxis ,
I feel your pain, I too had basically the same problems. I now mine pool, until this issue can be an anomaly instead of the norm. One thing you can do is to run multiple instances of the local wallet (I ran 3). two are backup and one is running the miner. If the miner wallet freezes, you can just go to the miner.conf and change the miner over to one of the two working wallets. Then copy the DB of the other running wallet to the frozen one and that will be ready to run as a backup. As you can see this still doesn't relieve you of your constant vigilance, that's why I bagged it, swallowed the 2% pool fee to let someone else babysit the wallet.
Another thing I thought about but never pursued, since it appears that pool software runs pretty good, once in awhile a wallet gets stuck etc. was to set up the pool software and I would be th only miner. But IIRC you need a vitual machine or some such crazy configuration, and I didn't look into it any further.