Freezing and disc problems, anyone else?

[Jase Winter]

I've had my PS3 since april. It's a US import 40GB model bought from movietyme.com. It's been used pretty much solely for blu-ray playback until recently, I decided since it gets a lot less use since I bought my UK stand alone blu-ray player, that I should get some games and actually use it. All was fine when playing blu-rays until now. I'm getting problems with freezing, if I quit out of a game the console freezes and the only way to get round it is to turn it off at the switch. I also had the same problem when I was prompted to download an update for little big plannet. The second problem i'm having is if a disc is in the drive when you boot up, it no longer seems to recognise the disc, you have to eject it then re-insert it. These are the only issues and other than this it is still working, I haven't tested it again with a blu-ray since these problems began. I also recently updated to the latest firmware, 2.53 I believe, are there any known issues with this firmware?

Basically i'm worried now that if there's a problem with it i'm basically completely screwed since it's an import, it's also the only way I can play a sizeable amount of region A locked discs in my blu-ray collection.

Anyone else had similar problems?