Just did another fresh install:

> this time i ran it with the ja2 vengeance exe that comes with the great reset mod and left out the face 216 patch
> still game starts taking money from me every hour
> figured out this is somehow related to Razor's Merc-salary as it is charged every hour only when I he is hired

So sth seems to be kinda corrupted, whatever that might be


edit:
Seems that the freeze issue at 59mins occurs randomly and has some other reason than rebel camp quest. Now it happened out of the blue during the first night with fresh install, no tinkering with any options etc, only thing I did was copying slfs to the data folder to get the game running.