Crashing in Pripyat

[Magnific Mungus]

So I finally sat back down to play after the latest patch and i've been having a blast. Made it to Pripyat and holy cow it gets intense in there !!!.
The recent AI update seems to be working much better. The Monolith cats are flanking me and being rather disagreeable overall which has ramped up the challenge thankfully. After finding and fully upgrading the Diamond Exoskeleton the game was feeling a bit too easy for a while there. Back to having to use cover and actually trying to survive again !!!

Speaking of trying to survive and the actual reason for my posting, I just defeated the Monolith group in The Sunny Kindergarten and destroyed the Monolith Emitter thing. For some reason now no matter what route I try to take to leave that area and continue to the next mission destination the game freezes and I get memory and CPU usage spikes, up to 100% and the game simply "stops responding". I have to end task in task manager and relaunch the game. I've rebooted my system, closed any unnecessary programs/tasks. Cleared my RAM etc. Still freezes the next time I try to leave the area.
I'm about to lower all the graphics settings from my custom/epic settings to LOW across the board and see if I can successfully pass through this area without a crash.
I will post back with results I just wanted to share and see if anyone else is experiencing similar issues there.