10.6.4 freezing issue.

Question

First here is what I'm running
Macbook Pro from 2009
OS X 10.6.4
2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Memory 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
Now my problem
I update from Leopard 10.5.8 two weeks ago to 10.6.3 then upgraded immediately to 10.6.4. Since the upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard I have been experiencing frequent freezes of my system. They happen no matter how many things I have running, or how little I have running. I have had my system freeze when I was just using iTunes, when starting up (a problem I never had with Leopard), when watching movies using VLC, and when just sitting without anything more than a single finder window open. Now when my mac locks up like this it lasts roughly 30 seconds and occurs anywhere from every 5 minutes to once every hour.
Now the steps I have tried to fix this
I spoke with an Apple Genius on the phone, nice person, and we went through things like clearing my caches, checking to see if my hard drive was ok with the disk utility thing (it came back green and good to go), eventually he told me that since I would see in my activity log that FINDER was becoming unresponsive from time to time that it was a system wide problem so I should just reinstall my OS and then update it when I could.
So i reinstalled 10.6.3 and updated it to 10.6.4 that very day. My problem persisted. I have since done 3 clean re installations (side note, my computer just did it again while typing this post) and every time I get the same issue, computer locking up frequently for 30 seconds at a time.
I am looking for any help I can get with this, even if it is just other people telling me they are having the same issues. I just want my computer to work the way it is supposed to, where i can listen to music without having my OS add its own silence in the middle of songs.
Please help,
BRJ

Answer 1

I personally think its a flaw with 10.6.4. I have a 2007 24" 2.8 Dual Proc Intel Mac. I was running 10.6 for some time with no issues. Then out of the blue i get the notice for the 10.6.4 update which includes some OS bug fixes and Safari 5. So I thought cool beans I'll give it a whirl. Wish I hadnt. Since the 10.6.4 update. Safari crashes like every other web page I go to. Ive tried resetting safari and still get the same issue. Then last night I got the BIG surprise where my system also started to lock up. I booted of my snow leopard CD and ran the disk util to verify the permissions which were all messed up and the integrity of the HD. I then repaired the messed up permissions and disk integrity and rebooted my system to find that now it will not boot at all. My system would just stick at a white apple logo screen. I then booted off the snow leopard disk again and reopted to install the OS. Nifty lil feature apple included with snow leopard. It did a clean install of the system folder but it also transferred my current profile and profile settings over to the new system folder. Which saved me ALOT of time. So far my system is running perfectly no issues or lockups. I am currently holding at 10.6. I decided to get on here and check the discussions to see if anyone else had similar issues with 10.6.4 and it seems they do. So im NOT installing 10.6.4 until apple makes some better adjustments to that OS. I advise others to do the same if they start having issues with their MAC after installing 10.6.4. Id revert back to 10.6. Hope this helps anyone else out there having some issues.