The first issue, system freeze while editing, is most likely some sort of hardware or driver conflict.  Audition itself won't be able to do much to the entire computer and OS, but the most likely link will be Auditions use of the audio driver.  Some quick things to check or try:

• Ensure you're using the latest driver from your audio device manufacturer.
• If you're using a native ASIO driver, try switching to MME or vice versa.  This can narrow down the problem, no matter the outcome.  (If the freezes occur with both drivers, it can point to hardware issues.  If it's isolated to one driver model, it points to the driver software.)
• Try temporarily changing your default audio device altogether.  If you're using an external device, try using the built-in options if available.  Or try using a third-party generic driver such as the one found at www.asio4all.com. 
• Note if you're using or enabled any sort of disk-cacheing or speedup utilities.  Sometimes these can introduce bad or unexpected behavior.
• You might want to run a few utilities to scan your hard drives and your RAM for errors or problems.  While I've occasionally managed to track a problem like this down to a driver, more often than not it's been a hard drive or RAM going bad.  Your system looks pretty new, though.  I'm not familiar enough with the Tapco Firelink to offer any specific advice yet.

For the second issue, the inability to use the crash recovery files, this is likely related to the system freeze.  If Audition crashes, the crash recovery files are usually properly closed by the OS file handler, so that they are more likely to be up-to-date and usable when you launch Audition the next time.  However, in the event of a catastrophic system failure (blue screen, power outage, or completely system freeze like you report) these files are not closed and are usually corrupt which could certainly cause Audition to fail.  I suspect if we can resolve the system lock-up issue, this second issue will not be a problem.