What driver are you currently using ?
100.14.19 (fixes a problem where one could hang the XServer) with that workflow.
If still happens with this and later, 100.14.23 or 169.04 drivers, would be interested in your hardware configuration, link to output of /usr/bin/nvidia-bug-report.sh. As well getting a gdb stack trace of where X/Maya is hung would be good.
ssh into the hung machine from another machine
change directory to the maya bin directory
cd /usr/autodesk/maya8.5/bin
find the process Id (pid) of the maya.bin process. use top to see what is happening. Is maya doing anything i.e. is CPU usage 0 or 100%.
launch/attach gdb to the maya.bin process
gdb maya.bin
use gdb "bt" command to get stack trace.