Troubleshooting Application Hangs on Mac OS X

"One utility to track down hangs is called Spin Control, which is installed with Apple's Developer Tools in the /Developer/Applications/Performance Tools folder. Once you open it, and an application hangs, it will ask for your password and start collecting data. Once the application crashes or becomes responsive again, you can look at the report it collected.

You can poke through the report and look at the listed calls, which are all the things the program was doing (indented items are sub-calls). The number next to each item in the list appears to be how much time was spent in that call, so if you look at the names of them (at least the intelligible ones), you may be able to glean some information as to what was taking so long. If you find something you're not sure of, you can also ask about it specifically.

And, if an application crashes, if you click the ""Report"" button, you will get a similar list of the things the program was doing when it crashed, in addition to the error that was raised. If you look at the error description, and look near the end of the list of calls, you can probably figure out what went wrong."

"Well, it could be a 3rd party extension, or it could be low ram or a slow harddisk.
What kind of computer is it?
Open up ""System Preferences."" Do you have any icons under ""Other""?
Open up /Library/InputManagers. Are there any files there?
When an app hangs, force quit it and click on ""Report."" Post the log here."