Time machine is great, except for the fact that it Denial-of-Services my machine every time it does a back up. It reminds me of the late 1999-2000 when the Anti-Virus programs for windows (Norton/Symantec) would do a full system scan on a desktop and make it useless for an hour. That, and my 18 month old top-of-line spends an inordinate amount of time with the spinning beach ball. And crashes when I plug in a 30" monitor 20% of the time.

I'm hoping that a scorched-earth fresh install of 10.6 will either eliminate the amazing flakyness or alternatively point me to a hardware problem.