This problem has been slowly developing over time and despite many attempts at fixing it took a real turn for the worst yesterday.

I've trashed preferences, fixed permissions, run Onyx, Disk Warrior, defragmented the boot drive, and reinstalled Snow Leopard. The problem is system wide though. While of course FCS suffers the most, all other applications are slowing down as well. Yesterday I had an out of memory message when I tried to open a 3rd sequence. Closing the other 2 didn't help. I had to reboot. I checked to make sure the 2nd ram module was still recognized and it was.

I'm thinking of cloning the drive, wiping it and reinstalling everything fresh.

I'm running FCS 3 on 10.6.3 on a MBP 2.33, 2 gigs of ram

Any advice on alternatives etc would be greatly appreciated and of course I'm concerned its a hardware issue, although it did pass a Smart Utility test.

Thanks

You could check what's hogging the memory with top or something...

I'm running FCS 3 on 10.6.3 on a MBP 2.33, 2 gigs of ramI really wouldn't want to run FCP in just 2GB. I really wouldn't want to run Snow Leopard at all in less than 4GB RAM. It will cost you less than $90 to purchase a 4GB upgrade from Crucial.

Based on all the software stuff you've tried it's most likely you're experiencing a slow-death hardware failure; either the main HDD, mainboard, CPU or something is about to totally give out.

Get it into an Apple Genius Bar and let them diagnose it - but don't wait before it's too late.

A friend had a problem sort of like this on a G5 tower but he managed through it until eventually the monitors stopped working. I thought it was a major hardware failure on the motherboard but the local Apple tech diagnosed that a RAM module had been going bad. A simple fix (and free RAM replacement under warranty) got the computer back up and running smoother than before. I have seen what bad RAM can do on other Macs but this was the first time I saw the monitors directly affected. One Mac with bad RAM ran fine until somebody would launch Photoshop and then the whole computer would crash. FCP didn't have the problem. Another Mac only had problems with Apple software updates, the applications always ran fine. Removing the bad RAM solved the software update problem. That was a little strange.