Got a strange problem with Snow Leopard that I was wondering if anyone had a solution for.

If I run iTunes, and it has a lot to do (e.g. downloading podcasts, plus maybe a TV show, etc.), about half the time the entire system will freeze up. First iTunes becomes unresponsive, then things like the dock become unresponsive, and eventually (within about a minute), the mouse becomes unresponsive, and the system turns into a big brick, requiring a hard reboot.

Any thoughts?

Thanks…

How much ram do you have? What kind of machine do you have? (CPU)

You also might want to download Onyx and dump your cache files and reboot.

It’s an Intel iMac (24”) with 4 GB RAM. And yeah, I’ve tried cleaning caches using Cocktail, repairing permissions, etc.

I was having a few minor issues with 10.6 after I upgraded (occasional Finder freezes, plus some other apps). I was also having a hardware issue (my internal microphone was only recording white noise) so, to rule out an OS driver issue or something, I ended up reinstalling 10.6 from scratch on a formatted drive. Rather than migrate, I reinstalled all of my apps from scratch on a new account (I did use MobileMe sync to bring down address books, calendars, bookmarks, keychains, etc.), and manually migrated the rest of my data.

It didn’t solve the microphone problem (that was fixed at the Genius Bar), but 10.6 has been rock-solid stable. If nothing else works (I’d probably try deleting iTunes preference files in ~/Library/Preferences, and maybe even reinstalling iTunes from http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/), and you have a spare couple of hours, and excellent backups, it might be worth a try.

DargonMac: Does the console show anything here when this problem starts? I also wonder if it’s an issue with the hard drive. That’s a lot of data being written from a lot of sources, but shouldn’t be a problem unless there’s an issue with the drive.