FaceTime Camera Freezes Intermittantly macOS Monterey 12

[MartinDeChico]

I have a 2019 iMac19,1 with 96 GB of memory.  This computer worked flawlessly with Zoom for about 1 1/2  years, but now the FaceTime camera nearly always "freezes" in any and all conditions in Zoom meetings.  I believe that this has only been a problem since the Monterey OS upgrade. 

I've done all the obvious things:  I have shut down every other program running on the computer, so I only had Zoom and Mozilla Firefox running.  Still, it's crashed - sometimes when I was the only person (the host) in the meeting! 

I've turned off Background and Filters plus "Optimize Video Quality with De-Noise" and "Use Hardware Accelleration..., too 

I have also done internet speed tests; I'm getting about 190-195 Mbps downloading and 5-6 Mbps uploading. 

Zoom support originally told me that this was due to heavy internet traffic, but their latest diagnosis is that this is caused by CPU usage spikes.  However, I have concurrently monitored CPU usage while using Zoom, and the crashes don't correlate to this.   Today I had the video crash about 1-2 seconds after I started my video; the total CPU usage was at about 12% when the video froze.