The development team is working on fixes for this type of problem. How long had your game been running continuously before you had the freeze? I suspect it was quite awhile. The game is only saved when you exit the game to the launcher or another application. It is not saved when a reset occurs. If your Palm reset every time you had the freeze, Village Sim would load your last savegame (from whenever you last exited the game normally) when you started it back up again after the reset. Any event that had occurred between the time of the last save and the freeze would be 'lost' (things like villagers dying, babies born, tech advances, puzzles solved, etc.), since those events were not saved.

It sounds like your savegame file might be corrupted, though. If you were going to start over, anyway, I'd uninstall the game and reinstall it.