First I definitely DON'T recommend you to switch back to 1.3.5.
1- There is no known USB problem specific to the 1.4.1 firmware version. 2- A lot of low-level bugs that could lead to firmware update error have been fixed with the 1.4.1. And 3- any user presets that you loaded have been converted from the 1.3.5 format and saved to the 1.4 format, and these formats are not compatible. Attempting to load a 1.4 preset with a 1.3.5 firmware will likely crash the DSPs and freeze your machine.
Second, back to your "freeze on the crowd image" bug.
One cause for a "freeze" on the crowd screen is the attempt to load a corrupted preset. So something to try is to restart your Origin while simultaneously pressing keys '0', '1' and '2'. This resets some internal settings, particularly it will tell Origin to start by loading the factory preset 1000, which is likely not corrupted because it is not modifiable.
A second cause is a problem with the firmware of the USB controller.
This is the bug that the tech note 2 is addressing. It's a bug which is known since a long time (not sure, but I think we're aware of it since the 1.1 version). We don't have a certain explanation of the bug. I think it is a hardware bug which may very rarely leads to a corruption of the content of a non volatile memory (the memory that contains the USB controller firmware). This kind of bug cannot be fixed by the firmware, that's why we published this tech note 2.