Demon's Souls (BLES00932) Crashes after killing anything in the Tutorial area

Same issue for me as well. In fact, the last version of the EMU that started up fine and let me play for an hour or so before the game would freeze was v.6696. With the newer versions, the game freezes during the initial loading screen, or once I kill the first enemy. If I reload the game, I can get a little farther into the tutorial stage, but it still eventually freezes up within a minute, with the FPS counter dropping to just under 10 FPS at that moment as the sound continues playing.

Now granted, I haven't tried every single version of the EMU since then, but it was after 6696 that the load/first kill freezes started for me.