Looks like I'm not the only disenchanted Snow Leopard user out there - plenty of people have been reporting the same mysterious "beachball lockup" that I've been seeing. what happens here is this:

• I'll take some UI action - closing a window, clicking on something, there's no pattern that I can find
• I'll get a beachball. If I click on another window, that one beachballs as well
• If I happened to be navigating desktops, the Spaces icon showing me which desktop I'm heading to "sticks" part way between
• Interestingly enough, the last time this happened, Twitterific (an Air app) didn't lock up - leading me to believe that it's a Cocoa issue of some kind

I kept track of how often it happened yesterday, and it was happening at least once an hour, for periods ranging from a few seconds to a couple of minutes each time. That's clearly no way to work; I nearly lost last week's podcast to one of these events. I've tried the suggestion mentioned in the forums (linked above) to use a third party utility called "Snow Leopard Cache Cleaner" - it seems to aggregate a bunch of system maintenance tasks into one UI. I'll know whether it's had any impact today - if I don't have a beachball incident within a couple of hours, that will be a good sign.

In the meantime, I'll reiterate - Apple pushed this release out too fast, for what looks like marketing reasons: beat Windows 7 to the door. The only thing saving them from a "Vista for Mac" tag is the fact that SL is so inexpensive. At this point, I'd recommend that anyone still on Leopard just stay there, at least until 10.6.3 comes out.

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