I have the same problem here on my Thinkpad T400s since upgrading to openSuSE Leap 42.2 coming from openSuSE Leap 42.1 (no problem). Today there was a patch coming in with a link to a bug id I had no access to, which was for xf86-video-intel. But I searched and found this description. I tried to reproduce by adding / locking and unlocking widgets but could not trigger the freeeze with it. I will wait and watch if the bug shows up again or not. If it shows up I will try the 'uxa' conf trick.