Frequent Cascading App Crashes

Question

Hi everyone,
I think I have a very serious problem and I can't find anyone who shares the same symptoms.
I upgraded from a Mac iBook to a Mac Pro desktop. After transferring all my data from the laptop to the Mac Pro, I booted up my new computer for the first time. After playing around on it for a half hour or so, an application freezes up (the error next to the app in the force quit screen reads application not responding). I continued playing and within 5 minutes, 3 or 4 more apps I had been running became equally unresponsive. I do NOT get the error message "The application XXXXX quit unexpectedly..." when a crash happens. The pplication either freezes or begins to behave irregularly. for example, VLC player will play a video once all the way through but without sound; toast will continue burning successfully until it comes time to eject the disk, then it will freeze up. When I tried to force quit out of any of the apps, I would be unable to do so. Although the application's window(s) close after 5 or 6 force quits, the app remains open and the lightblue/white app indicator light below each app stays lite. The only way for me to regain control of my mac was to force reboot. Once i reboot, everything seems normal again.
It's been that way ever since. I was hoping it might be a bug that would go away with software updates but this has not been the case, and the problem has persisted for over half a year. Here are some notable observations I've made regarding this problem over that time period:
1) The domino effect seems to be confined to certain application / processes but once it begins I have no choice but to reboot. (There is no way that I've found to run an application again in the same session once it quits). The certain application / processes that continually trigger this effect are typically:
- launching any of the following apps: system preferences, firefox, visualhub, toast, itunes, quicktime, and VLC player. I'm sure there are others, but this is the group that always starts the crashing chain.
2)copying items from one drive to another (or deleting items) also starts this.
3) The finder seems to quit randomly as well. My mouse then turns into the colored pinwheel that never ends unless i restart the finder 4 or 5 times. After that, my system behaves very strangely. For example, it no longer copies files instantly from one location to the next when copying. Instead, I'll copy a file and the pinwheel will come on for 5 or 6 seconds and lock my computer up until the file is copied (im still able to move the mouse but can't select or click on anything.)
4) I have seen no recognizable pattern about the order in which these apps quit or how far into the session it takes for the cascade to start. Sometimes this happens on the first application I open, other times I can open & close apps numerous times before the the problem occurs; sometimes I will have just turned the computer on and other times it will have been running for a few days before the problem occurs).
5) The problem seems to occur sooner and more frequently after a forced shutdown. (in order to keep the problem at bay after a force quit, I reboot, shut down, and reboot properly before using my computer again.
6) When I was running my system on the iBook, I never experienced anything like this (in terms of frequency & the effect of the app crashes). Again, I literally copied the exact system I was running on the iBook to the Mac Pro - same exact OS (10.5) with the same exact software; essentially I was running the same virtual system. This leads me to think that there is some sort of essential memory or hardware malfunction in my Mac Pro.
I've ran Tech Tools Pro 5 numerous times looking for anything suspect all the checks & tests appear to be more or less normal (no "major" problems, no bad blocks). I haven't been able to troubleshoot this problem from other forums as no one else seems to be experiencing anything like this. The only suggestion I've had was to repair disk permissions - reboot from the startup disk & repair permissions that way. I've done this a few times and the problem persists.
Can anyone offer some insite into what is going on here or better yet, what I can do to fix it?

Answer 1

I sometimes have the same problem. But only if my Mac has been running for a few weeks.
Applications just stop responding, Activity Monitor and Terminal too, so I can't go and start killing processes.
I've had this while running the original Apple harddisk and while I've been running of my SSD's, so it's not a problem caused by the drive the OS is running from. Both were clean installs with only my own files copied to the home folder (and some exported settings), precisely to make sure everything was 'clean'.
I've not had the problem while running Snow Leopard, yet, but I've only had this running for 4 days now...