Os x tiger help - finder crashes all over the place

Question

This is my first mac, I'm coming here for help, I'll try to keep muy internal laughing to a minimum, I bought this thing "because of all the hype" and "macs dont crash.... blah....blah...blah.." (I guess the people doing the pc vs mac commericals DONT visit here..)
Anyways, I just got it back after having to send it in on day 4 for a failed lcd and motherboard (lets not go there)
Anyways, Im still learning my way around the OS, I come from the Unix wsorkstation, and linux laptop world, so please bear with me.
From day 1 I have been having problems with the entire finder system reseting, Im going to call it finder because for instance if I have safari open in the back ground, it doenst restart, but my hard drive icons, and icons on the desktop disapear and then return after a few seconds (Im assuming this is finder restarting). Their is no real madness to the restarting, I can however almost guarentee that it will restart while broswing a NFS or AFS share from my NAS device. Almost ALLWAYS when I click the left mouse button (to pull up info/trash/copy), about 25% of the time it will pause and then bring up the menu, 50% of the time it works with no issue, and 25% of the time it just like flashes the entire screen and repopulates my icons on my desktop. If I was in a couple of subfolders, they are not re-opened. If I had managed to change the view "list" properties, those do not hold either (unless I make the change, close the window, and then reopen) but anything done in that session does not hold.
It started off doing it mostly in my network attached disks, but I think that was because most of my software is there, I started to notice that it does it wihtin the "Mac HD" just as often now, but then again, I wasnt navigating there in the beggining as much.
When I got my laptop back on day 14 after they replaced the video card and lcd, I decided that I would install OSX as when I bought it, it was preinstalled.
With a fresh os install it does the same thing. I then paid to have the 75gb drive replaced with a 200gb drive and re-installed again, it seemed as though it wasnt happening as much, but on day 16, its started doing it again. Its not like I can do something to make it happen every time, its random, my only guess is that something is wrong with the hardware, since it happens with a fresh os install. I have installed a few applicaitons that tie into the OS, like stuffit w/magic menu. I guess I can uninstall all those applications to make sure that they are not to blame. Anyone have any suggestions, are their finder logs some where in the BSD installation I can look at?. I have also been told that my 2 gb ram upgrade and 200gb HD replacement will have to be removed before I attempt to take it to a "genuis" (common man) again. Before I have to pay or do that myself, can someone verify that this is the case?
Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

Being that you had to have the motherboard replaced, I'd say there might be more "bad" parts in there. There are stories in these forums of people that got lemons and it took a lot of persistence to get them replaced. One bad Apple...
You might find a crashlog in the CrashReporter logs using the Console app (Utilities folder). Since your are not getting a "this app failed, do you want to report..." I don't think it will be written to CrashReporter, but any of the logs may give you a clue (a lot of stuff is written to the console log).
As for replacing the original parts, I don't know if that would be required by Apple, but it would surely give them an "out" to lay the blame somewhere else. It shouldn't be difficult to swap them back out yourself, especially the RAM.