SL Locking my machine up

This does not happen all the time but SL over the past week has been locking my Imac up badly. Locked up and I was able to force quit. I opened up the activity monitor to watch things and next time it locked up the system resources pegged out. When sl is not running not much in the way of resources is used. When sl is running everything is maxed out. Sl is a really badly behaved client. How many other people are experiencing this prob?

I am screen shots of the activity before and during.

OK what spec is your iMac?

Is it a G4, G5, Core Duo or C2D?

SL will be slow on a Power PC G4 (lamp shade iMac) however should be fine on any G5 onwards iMac as long as it has at least 512mb of memory and OS X Tiger.

Unfortunately, the memory requirements are greater than you describe.

SL can easily break a 500 MB memory resident footprint. OS X has needed 512 all by itself to be really happy doing actual work since at least 10.4. These things are easily discovered using Activity Monitor or the "top" utility in Terminal.

1 GB is the bare minimum of RAM for SL on OS X, 2 GB if one wishes to have any other application running besides the viewer.

There has been a bug for a while in the OS X viewer that causes stalling with certain graphics cards. I am guessing the problem stems from that.

Try this viewer:

http://hyangreflections.blogspot.com/

It works very well here, no more stalling, hanging, or crashes.