10.7.2 Lion freezing / apps lock up, must hard reset 2-3 times daily

Question

I've seen several posts on this -- oddly, some of them are archived even though there has been no resolution...
Would love to hear people's experiences and especially if you have a fix. Would REALLY love it if Apple would get off their duff and give us a working O/S.
Ever since upgrading to Leopard I've been having problems with system stability and, specifically, with lockups. Usually this starts out with a few applications get "hung" (beach ball). Again, usually, I can force quit them, restart and continue for at least a little while... but, it always marks the beginning of a downward spiral. The final straw seems to be when Finder locks up. Once Finder locks, the system becomes unresponsive overall and I can't shut down without doing a hard reset (either cmd-opt-power or, more often, just hold power until a get a hard reboot).
Some of the behaviors I'm seeing:
Apps start to lockup. Best option at this point is to quickly shut everything down and restart. On occasion I get a software restart if I'm prompt about it.
Finder locks up... forget it. Hardware restart is in my future... will generally try to save work, but it seems that anything involving disk / file system access is completely frozen.
About one out of two times, the login screen is very slow to appear (about a 2 minute boot), and then it fails to respond to my wireless keyboard &/or mouse. Sometimes the mouse works, keyboard doesn't. If I wait for 1-2 minutes, it will usually "wake up" and suddenly gets all of the input in one blast... but usually I lose patience, open up the laptop, do another hard reset.
Sometimes the screen saver won't release control of the machine (much like login screen). I can move the mouse, tap keys, etc., screen saver just keeps right on running blithely along...
On rare occasion, even the force quit panel (cmd-opt-escape) refuses to appear.
Of late, I've taken to launching Terminal on login so that it's available (because after the lockups start, I won't be able to launch it). Then, I can issue a "shutdown -r now" which, most of the time, seems to work pretty well. I hate doing a hard reset, always worried it will lead to a damaged file structure or lost work.
I've tried a number of fixed, including (at the height of it) reinstalling 10.7.2, which I did a few days ago. It made no difference at all... Also tried resetting NVRAM, etc. About the only folklore I haven't tried yet is switching to Chrome or Firefox. A lot of people are blaming Safari for all of this, so perhaps I'll try that next...
I'm suspecting that Time Machine is making the situation worse, but turning it off (and disconnecting the drive) does NOT solve the problem. It seems to go a little longer in-between system lockups. Same symptoms... apps become unresponsive, one after the other starts to beach ball, eventually the whole system locks up... I'm wondering if it has something to do with disk access, as posted in other threads. I've been trying to minimize disk access wherever possible, for one, just plugging in my Time Machine drive about once a day, let it backup, then unplug. Not really sure if it's helping or not though.
Currently, I'm running into this on average 3 times daily (worst day was 6 times, best day was just once, yay...) Yes I've been keeping track. By my count I'm also losing up to two hours a day, because the shutdown / reboot process is so baby-sitting intensive (and I have to do it several times a day).
Very, very frustrating. This is definitely the worst O/S release Apple has ever put out there. I'd like to go back to Leopard, but worried about the downgrade... arrrgggh. (Wish Mr. Jobs was still around, somehow I think he would never have tolerated this...)

Answer 1

Cattus Thraex wrote:
Hm... what are the specific issues?
I launch iPhoto, use it a few times, and it hangs, requiring a restart of the iMac;
iPhoto complains that I am not connected to the Internet (when trying to display GPS data) when I am fully connected
Magic Mouse's connection drops about every 15 to 40 minutes of typing, often in this Discussion. Apple Care suggested that keeping my battery charge above 50% would solve it. It didn’t.(My batteries are Apple’s, as is the charger.);
When I return my hand to the Magic Mouse, the active window often suddenly scrolls up which looses the position of the pointer. This can cause problems in graphical apps like InDesign;
Mail's boxes display a small triangle every few days and will not send or receive, requiring Mail to be re-launched;
In Mail I cannot get pictures of people to appear in messages sent by them.
In Mail, stationery does not work properly. Neither of these two is an earth-shattering fault, but having been offered them I wasted a lot of time trying to get them to work.)
Time Machine three times over the last 1 1/2 years (OS 10.5 once and Lion twice) has complained that its HD is full when it is only ~1/2 full. A full reset on the last two did not cure it (I had not discovered Pondini's Full Reset until Lion). Pondini's symptom's and solutions did not match the error. Each time I had to erase and start again;
A couple of months ago, as a test, (after confirming my daily bootable backup of my system done by Carbon CopyCloner), I re-installed Lion from the InstallED.dmg, accepted the invitation to restore from TM, and upgraded to 7.2. All looked well except Mail displayed only the Header and first two lines of the body of messages, all the rest of the bodies were blank. Another major thing did not work after this re-installation (I can't remember the details now);
Carbon Copy Cloner can fail to find its Firewire backup HD about every 10th time (I have a daily schedule). The connections to the drive are plugged in OK but the drive is no longer mounted, whether the iMac has been restarted or woken up. CCC has been absolutely rock solid for years until Lion;
My Canon scanner (current driver, and it always worked before Lion), more times than not complains that it cannot start because it is in use elsewhere. I have to unplug its USB and re-connect.
In SystemPrefs > iCloud, a dialogue box said that Sys. Prefs. wants to use confidential info in my keychain. I press “Deny” and the box returns for ever until I force quit Sys. Prefs.
Software Update repeatedly tells me that a certain update is available but I already have installed it.
For those silly enough to install a new OS within a year of its introduction (not me: my iMac came with the wretched thing in it), some bugs can be expected, but not this many (at least in my opinion). All previous updates going back to 1997 have gone much more smoothly than Lion on my machines.
Although I am in a minority (given the huge number of sales of Lion – although MacWorld reports that sales of Lion are faltering), I am sorry to say that I have fallen out of love with Apple. I would gladly trade the elegance and the fancy features for a bit of “Works out of the box”, “It  just works”, “Computing for the rest of us”.