Hangs requiring hard reboot

Question

Greetings all,
Where would I start troubleshooting this issue? My macbook will hang periodically, and I have to turn it off to get it back responding.
Things that happen when it does this
1) Mail will start to check, but never actually checks.
2) I can bring up spotlight, and start launching an app - it will appear in the dock, bouncing. It will eventually stop bouncing, but it never opens - the blue dot never appears.
3) In Force quit, I can end tasks, but if I try to relaunch finder, it vanishes from the list, but never restarts.
4) If I have terminal open, and I attempt to launch Top (or another command) it doesn't start. I just get a blinking cursor, and no command prompt.
5) I'll get the spinning beachball of death in the individual apps, but not overall.
6) I can attempt to restart, and it brings up the window with choices, but none of the buttons are selectable (though one appears to be, it isn't).
I've been removing all the weird little autostart stuff.
All of this started after I did a clean install of Snow Leopard. It is particularly prone to happening when the machine comes out of sleep mode.

Answer 1

I had the same setup with the apple BT keyboard and the V270 mouse. I also work with the lid closed and with an external monitor (I bet that you are also using airport)! Both devices seem to intermittently loose connection, and the mouse cursor doesn't track very well. Looking through postings it seems that airport interferes with BT, and the behavior I've seen seems to support this. I stopped using the mouse because I couldn't get it to work adequately. I'v also tried using BT headphones (Motorola HT820) which at best the sound drops out intermittently, and at worse crashes OS X. I'm thinking that BT on the Macbook Pro just marginally works... I'd be curious if you ever had any success with your setup!