You can fly in follow-mode without freezing screen. But again if you get really close to the ground you get a short freeze. The simulation continues during screen freezes. Which often leads to a crash so the freezed/black screen will last until next flight...
In my oppinion it doesnt depend on the catalyst driver. I'm running a modified ATI 9500 (to perform as an Radeon 9700 PRO) at an Athlon XP 1800+. This configuration does not have any problems with other flight simulations (even not with e.g. Il-2 Sturmovik, which was optimized for nVidia cards and during development never tested on ATIs).
The new FMS 2.0 Alpha 7.5.1 has the same problem.
It would be great if there would be a new version of the great FMS soon without these problems!
If anyone of the developers is interested in an alpha-tester, just send me an e-mail!