Perhaps not really a great solution but what I wound up doing is
checking the buffer percentage and when the buffer indicates that it is loaded less than 20% I just trigger a re-connection. (OVP has a property called bufferPercentage, but its just a calculation of NetStream.bufferLength/NetStream.bufferTime). I also save the ns.time so that when I call play after re-connecting I tell it to start at the point where it left off.
Not an ideal solution but it seems to have at least offered an alternative to a freezing video stream.
This might be an isolated incident as I was using the Open video Player, but i've used this library several times without any issues along with the Amazon S3 Flash Streaming server. http://openvideoplayer.sourceforge.net/ovpfl/docs/asdocs-fp10/index.html