I know many people have had a variety of issues with Bridge hanging. Since I just solved mine and it was both vexing, yet eventually easy to fix, I thought I'd note it here in case it might help someone els.
After using the Bridge Uploader to import Camera RAW files from my CF card, my comuter locked up and when I restarted it, Bridge would no longer open a directory. Instead it froze up. The odd thing was that I could still access the menu bar for a while.
Trying to use Exit from the File menu would cause Bridge to hang, but using Close Window from the File menu would simply close Bridge. The behavior was odd and insconsistent. I suspected I had somehow corrupted the program files.
I tried the "CTRL + Start Bridge" method, but nothing happened.
So I uninstalled (deauthorize first) and reinstalled Photoshop. I ran a registry cleaner and rebooted again. Then started Photoshop, did the updates, rebooted again and STILL, Bridge froze and behaved exactly as before.
So, I downloaded and used the Adobe Cleaner program which is designed to clean up remnants of Beta installations, but I got the distinct impression it also worked for previous installations of the normal program (think I read that somewhere).
Reinstalled again, and STILL the same behavior.
Then I thought, how about the very first thing I tried to no avail - Holding down the CTRL button while launching Bridge.
Apparently, the reinstalls reset whatever had prevented this preference reset from working in the first place.
I wish I had tried this after the first reinstall so I could know for sure if a simple uninstall/reinstall followed by CTRL + Launching of Bridge would have worked.
Anyway, this is probably bleedin' obvious to many here, but it took me two days to figure it out. Maybe it will help someone else out too!
BTW, I absolutely love Bridge. When it's working, I find the workflow extremely fast, efficient and intuitive.