Hard drive beachball problem for the 17"

Ok, so I know that there is already a few posts about this issue, (including the very large 96 page one) but I wanted to start a post for those of us with a 17" MBP that are having the same issues.
I was on the phone to a senior technician at Apple (Australia) today for about 2 hours trying to sort out this problem. Firstly he was a bit hazy about the issue to begin with assuming it was a RAM paging issue. Seriously, this thing has 4gb of ram, I think you would have to running so much stuff at once for it to legitimately run out of ram. I'm a web developer/designer so I can push the machine reasonable hard sometimes but I get the beachballs even when I only have safari and mail open. This is the fastest (stock) laptop Apple have ever produced, surely it can handle a bit of stick.
So I suggested it could be the hard drive/firmware etc and mentioned about the large amount of people on here with the exact same issue. After looking into some internal documentation he noted that there was indeed similar problems happening around the place but he seemed convinced that this only applied to 13" and 15" models and that the 17" never got the 1.7 firmware update.
After looking at the firmware page: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1237 it seems maybe he's right. I can't see my boot ROM version there anywhere (MBP52.008E.B05) The mid 2009 model 17" isn't on that list.
Whilst my friend at Apple is reasonably sure that my issue is software related and wants me to watch the console when Im having the freezing, I'm positive that I'm having the exact same problem as the 13 and 15s.
Can other people with 17" MBP that are having the same issue please post here so that we can begin to build a case for Apple to acknowledge the problem for our model too? Please add whether you have installed a 3rd party hdd or whether you are having the problem despite only having the stock hdd like me.
Thanks guys.

soniktrooth, count me in. I am experiencing the same problem myself - I just recently posted over in the mega forum here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10222616#10222616
There is a chance that the hard disk could be at fault I guess, but the symptoms of this problem for me are remarkably similar to what I've read in the 96 page post, and on the macrumors forums. To summarise:
* the problem usually begins when I'm playing iTunes all day, and then I'll go to save something, say in TextMate, and then iTunes stops playing.
* Any app you then try to switch to while the freeze is there will then just beachball itself.
* Like you, I know this is something out of the ordinary, since iTunes rarely stops playing music, and hardly ever did on my 4 year old G5.
* I can make the problem go away by restarting and zapping the PRAM. All day today my computer has been fine, but I suspect that sometime tomorrow it'll probably start all over again.
* My drive is a factory Hitachi 5400 RPM drive... what do you have?
* My boot ROM version is the same as yours too.
* I have 8GB of RAM in this machine, so I'm pretty **** sure it's NOT a paging issue for me. paging issues never last 20-30 seconds though, that's absurd if anyone claims that is the cause... also, the hard disk doesn't really crank noticeably while the freeze is there.
I'm wondering if there was some sort of revision too for this model that may be causing this. Seems unlikely that Apple would have changed the motherboard between the january model and this one, but I'm not sure if this is absolutely confirmed...

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