Noticeable freezes in game

So, decided to finally give this a shot, as I loved the game long ago but ran right up against the language barrier. Having gotten into the game though, I am currently stymied by a rather minor but frustrating nuisance. Every so often, ranging from 30 seconds to to a couple minutes, the game will freeze up completely, before stuttering back into life a few seconds later. Having scoured around, I've seen suggestions that it's do with antivirus or being on Windows 10, but there are two problems with this for me:
1) I use kaspersky security labs (debating on whether or not to continue to do so when the license expires); I've tried turning that off, and separately adding the game to trusted applications, but neither fixed the freezing issue
2) Can't really revert Windows 10 at this stage. The .NET 3.5 framework installer doesn't really work either - possibly because of being on 4.5 - so if that's the solution, I guess I'm scuppered.

So is there anything else that might be responsible and that I could attempt to fix? Or am I just stuck putting up with this for the time being?

Basically it seems to get stuck on a frame for several seconds, thus appearing (and possibly being, if it doesn't accept input) frozen. It happened once mid-cutscene, and it just skipped to some later point of the cutscene rather than continued where it left off, so the underlying game is presumably still running. Tested it with FRAPS on too, and the framerate just collapsed before coming back up.