Yes, a bad track might cause the player to freeze up. How to fix it is here.

But if the track kept playing just fine and only the buttons stopped responding, then it's unlikely to be a bad track. Having the wrong version of the software was very specifically known to cause this at one point. There was a bug in I think it was 2.0 beta 11 or perhaps a bit earlier that caused this.

Hard disk trouble might also cause this.

Also look here.

There is also a chance you have a bad solder joint on the display board, or a bad cable connection between the display board and the motherboard.

Are you running any third-party software on the player?