My gmod is terribly slow so it may be my version of someone's mass lag when dying.

Same thing happens to me. It has to be the WAD file, i recently swapped WAD files becuase some textures wern't loading. Now all of the textures load, but when i die my game crashes

not sure if you still need help but i have this problem also, i just set the ai to ignore players and it avoids the crashing or lagging all together. i binded a key to "ai_ignoreplayers 0" and another to "ai_ignoreplayers 1" and when i spawn an ememy and turn off and imediatly turn on ignore players, that also works. i forgot to mention, when you set the ai to ignore players they'll ignore you untill you shoot them like once or twice.