Constant crashing with Snow Leopard, even with "clean install"

Question

I've had a lot of trouble with crashes after installing SL. These crashes seem related to video issues. iMovie crashes immediately. iPhoto crashes if I double-click a photo. QuickTime crashes all the time. Usually these crash the entire system. The video of my entire screen sometimes get broken and jittery just before such a system crash. I've also had the crash where the screen becomes gray and I'm told to restart in many languages.
Anyway, I finally erased my disk and "clean installed" SL, updated it to 10.6.5, then installed iLife 11 and updated that. iMovie immediately crashed. Does this confirm a hardware error, or are there some hidden settings (like in the PRAM) that can be wrong and are carried over even through a clean install? If so, how do I restore these to the factory defaults?
Message was edited by: Stuart Field

Answer 1

Stuart Field wrote:
I've also had the crash where the screen becomes gray and I'm told to restart in many languages.
Those are "kernel panics," which are usually hardware-related.
Start with this: [Intel-based Macs: Using Apple Hardware Test|http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1509].
and the (free) Rember, a heavy-duty memory tester, from: http://www.kelleycomputing.net/
If nothing there helps, see this Apple article: [If “You need to restart your computer” appears|http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.6/en/8965.html].
More kernel panic info:
Apple Support - About kernel panic messages
Mac OS X Kernel Panic FAQ
The X Lab - Resolving Kernel Panics
Apple Developer - Technical Note TN2063: Understanding and Debugging Kernel Panics
Tutorial: Avoiding and eliminating Kernel panics