my emulator also started crashing a lot a couple of months ago
my guess is you are running windows 7 home premium 64 bit. you are always updating windows when there are new updates. your emulator was working fine for some time then it suddenly started crashing
the same thing happened to me. i had bought an hp pavilion dv6 laptop 1 year ago. it was powerful enough to run a ps2 emulator. yay :-) i started playing final fantasy x. i played it for 3 months. during that time i kept my system updated. then one morning i played the game for a few hours, pressed escape to pause the emulator, closed the laptop lid and later on i resumed playing in the afternoon. i often play on turbo mode. shortly after i started playing the emulator crashed. i thought it was nothing so i restarted the emulator and loaded the game. the same thing happened :-( less than a minute passed and the emulator crashed again!!! i tried it a few times but no luck. i then desperately started experimenting trying to fix the crash. i uninstalled and reinstalled the emulator, i tied different settings, i updated my graphics driver but nothing worked. the emulator always crashed when i put turbo mode and sometimes it crashed on normal mode. also sometimes the crash caused windows to freeze with the blue screen of death. i had completed three quarters of the game and couldn't continue it:-( at that point i gave up trying to fix the problem. in the past 3 month i had faced problems with windows. it was often freezing and i got the blue screen a couple of times. i realized that the constantly updated home premium is the source of all my problems because it caused an unstable system. my OS had to go so i formatted and put enterprise 32 bit. i had read somewhere that i had to turn on speedhack and set ee cyclerate to 1.5 . there was no 1.5 so i set it to 2. the emulator crashing stopped and i was able to continue playing. however 5 days later my motherboard died due to excess overheating because i gamed for long hours and temp of my laptop was often high and i wasn't using a coolpad. when i got a new motherboard my machine came back with factory settings. i format and put pro 64 bit. i did windows update once. i got blue screens. i format again. i put pro 32 bit and immediately switched off windows update. i installed the emulator and loaded the game. it crashed once. i then set ee cyclerate to 2 and from then on my problems were solved. yay :-) i was able to complete final fantasy x and after that i completed final fantasy x-2. i am now playing metal gear solid 3. in the past year my system used to rarely freeze and sometimes when i am starting the emulator, but that happened once every couple of weeks or months. i can live with that
the moral of my long story is:-
1) on some machines constantly doing system updates, bios updates and driver updates is bad. if u have been doing that and suddenly your pcsx2 starts to crash and u are desperate to fix it then format and put win 7 pro or ultimate 32bit or 64 bit, IMMEDIATELY switch off windows updates, only install the drivers needed and that's it
2) turn on speedhacks and set ee cyclerate to 2
see my post here to see my current settings:
http://forums.pcsx2.net/Thread-are-these...antasy-xii