Program crashes regularly

Question

I've got a group of programs that crash way too often to be considered coincidental. The group includes Firefox 2.0, SuperDuper, XCode 2.4.1, and iTune 7.0.2. All are the latest Universal versions and I've removed and reinstalled all of them multiple times.
My setup:
Mac Pro 2.66 GHz, 4 GB RAM (2 GB Apple, 2 GB Crucial certified to Mac Pro specifications). 3 500 GB harddrives (1 stock 500 GB Seagate, and 2 identical to stock Seagate 500 GB's). I use one of the Seagates as a destination for an image of the main drive. I use the 3rd Seagate as the repository for all my Parallels VMs (Win XP, Ubuntu 6.10, and Fedora Core 5).
I've run the TechTool Deluxe multiple times and find no evidence of any hardware problems. I've removed the Crucial Memory and the problem still occurs. I've swapped the Crucial for the stock Memory, and the problems still occur. I've done deep verifications of all the hard drives. I can't get a bead on the causes of these problems. I've sent EVERY crash report to Apple and I've tried to dissect what the programs were doing at the time of crash. Nothing jumps out. I can say that the problems occur more frequently when the machine comes "out of sleep" than at any other time, but I don't leave programs running while the machine is "sleeping".
The fact that these programs come from both Apple and 3rd Parties doesn't suggest a particular programming issue unless it is in the SDK for Tiger.
I is hard to seek help from Apple when the problems aren't consistent. It is hard to seek help from the program developers when their program isn't alone with the problems.
I'm running out of ideas short of completely reinstalling the OS and reinstalling all of the apps. At this point, that would be a really time consuming process as I have quite an array of 3rd party applications installed.
Any thoughts or suggestions on whether my problems are common or rare and whether there are other things I might check out before taking the big hammer. These crashes occur often enough to be really annoying, but not consistently enough that I can predict when they'll occur.
Help or ideas appreciated.

Answer 1

I don't know exactly what the problem is, but the crash reports in the log folder have been reviewed by the developers of SuperDuper! and Onyx. They both confirm that the error is in 10.4.8 and that they're getting many reports of problems that emerged when 10.4.8 was released. That led to careful evaluation of the crash logs and bug reports filed to Apple regarding the crashes. I don't know what the bug numbers are and the crash reports don't mean a whole lot to me without access to the program source code. I know that lots of people use these programs without problems, but with the vendors acknowledging significant problems under 10.4.8, one can only wait it out until Apple addresses the problem(s) in a future update.
The problem with SuperDuper is replicable and occurs under a very specific circumstance that many people may not use. I use the scheduler to image my harddrive nightly (I've got 3 identical 500 GB drives, not in a RAID configuration). Typically SuperDuper has to awake from sleep to run as I don't want it interrupting my own work. If the machine has been asleep for a long time (more than 2 hours), it seems to have some difficulty awaking for SuperDuper. The program runs for a few minutes and then crashes, typically right after repairing permissions on the source drive and before starting to actually image to the new drive. If I run SuperDuper directly, without waking the machine from sleep, it runs flawlessly. I have the same problems with ONyX - it runs unattended, requiring the machine to awaken from sleep. These two problems seem related to one specific problem with 10.4.8.
The problems with Firefox are harder to duplicate, except that they are pretty consistent. Firefox seems to crash for no apparent reason. Typically I'm navigating on a page that has a lot of fancy html code. Firefox just barfs and tosses me out. Other times, I can load Firefox cold and have it fail run out of the box.
iTunes crashes under a variety of circumstances, none predictible. And the list goes on.
I've done heavy troubleshooting, including removing RAM, moving RAM around, removing hard drives, switching hard drives from Bay 2 to Bay 1 (Bay 2 is a clone of Bay 1 and I've made the drives interchangeable). I've done extensive RAM testing 100's of replications. I've tested hardware with the AHT as well as TechTool and I've run these tests immediately after one of these crashes occurs and before they occur.
I'm convinced the problem is not hardware. Were it not for the solid responses from the SuperDuper and ONYx developers, I would do a reformat and reinstall, but I'm convinced it is a waste of time unless I'm willing to do it for a downgrade. Since that is the only way to do it, I'm going to proceed slowly.
Thanks for your response.