Here's what happened: one (or more) pictures became corrupted. That means that for whatever reason, be it something you did, or just a random unexpected occurrence for no reason what so ever, point is, the data that the picture(s) is(/are) made of is messed up.
Here's something to try: open My Computer, and then change the view to list view, then open the folder with the pictures on the camera. The reason your computer would freeze before is because it would load the images as thumbnails, but since one of them is corrupted, it would cause the computer to freeze, but by viewing them as a list, it won't try to load the images. Then what you do is you open each image, one by one, individually. At some point your computer will freeze, but the trick here is that it will help you find out which picture is corrupted. Let's say you open picture 10.jpg, and your computer freezes. Now you know that's the bad picture, so when you restart (or relaunch explorer, or however you plan to go about unfreezing your computer), do what I said again, except instead of opening the images, just go to the image that froze your computer, and right click and click "Delete." If you're lucky, it was just the one picture and you should be good now. Otherwise, just repeat the process till you get rid of all the bad pictures.
That's the long way, the short way is to just plug the camera into the computer, open My Computer, right click on the camera, and click Format. This is quick, however, it will delete all your pics indiscriminately.