Crashing frequently

Question

Having some issues on my iMac after installing SL.
I get frequent crashes of various programs, be it Firefox (latest), Safari, Office 2008 (Word, Entourage etc..) I can't pinpoint exactly what I'm doing when it crashes, but today it was when trying to attach a document from my desktop.
Ie. Trying to attach a PDF file to an email in entourage, crash
Trying to send a file using MSN messenger, crash
Trying to attach a file in Firefox or Safari, crash
To be more specific, ie for browsing, on a website when you want to upload a file and it says BROWSE, and then you see the files on your desktop, when I click the file and OK, it then crashes the program (all kinds of files, PDF, even a TXT). Same for email and MSN.
I did VERIFY startup disk, said everything was OK. I repaired permissions as well.. Rebooted the iMac..
Very frustrating. My macbook seems to be fine with SL, so I'm not sure whats bugging the iMAC. I've been sending the error reports to Apple, but of course, that doesn't solve the immediate problem..
any suggestions?
p.s. opening the files themselves from the desktop, ie PDF or TXT, no problems..

Answer 1

but the only thing for me is that it seems to be affecting a huge amount of installed softwares. Trashing (or backing up) preferences plists for all office apps, mail, entourage, msn messenger, safari, firefox ,ichat etc. doesn't seem like the right course of action.
it doesn't seem isolated, it does seem to be system wide.
as you mentioned, i did reboot, to no avail.
a) if you haven't done so, you should try creating a new account and see if your problems follow there
b) here's a scenario I can imagine that would explain why trashing prefs could solve the problem. Your computer locked up, crashed, or lost power while you were running a large number of programs and as a result many plists were slightly damaged but not enough that Leopard had problems with them. However, changes to Snow Leopard make programs more unforgiving about those small errors resulting in the crashes. Is that the problem? I don't know. But I do know that I had two programs that worked fine in Leopard and crashed under Snow Leopard. Since I upgraded to SL using the default upgrade and I ran Disk Utility before upgrading I know there was no difference between those two files on the upgraded disk and on the clone. On the Leopard clone the two programs ran. On the SL drive they crashed before completing their launch. One problem was resolved by deleting the pref. The other was resolved by deleting the cache.