Activity Monitor crashes entire system

[AGreen BHM]

I cleanly installed 10.6.3 from the iAtkos S3v2 disc this morning on my Dell Inspiron E1505. Everything works great except for Activity Monitor. When I launch this application, the entire system crashes and I get the "You need to restart your system. Hold down the power button..." error message.

 

The first time I did this was when I was installing the 10.6.5 combo update. This mucked my system up enough to make me re-install the whole thing, but now I see that it is still causing the problem. The first time I installed SL it was from the iAtkos CD. The second time, I wrote the ISO to a USB drive. Also, I verified the checksum of the ISO before burning it originally.

 

I have a netbook that has SL installed (using a vanilla retail disc + NetBookMaker), so I tried taking the Activity Monitor application from that system and putting it on my E1505, but it caused the same problem.

 

I looked for the com.apple.ActivityMonitor.plist file in the \users\(my username)\Library\Preferences\ folder, but there wasn't one.

 

Any ideas on what I can do to get Activity Monitor to work (or any suggestions of a 3rd party process/task manager)?

 

Thanks!

[AGreen BHM]

Ok, I have an update:

 

I installed atMonitor, hoping that would be a useful replacement. It seems to have worked yesterday, but now when I launch it, it crashes my system also. Other than this, the whole system seems to be doing fine, so I'm not quite sure what's wrong. Perhaps some sensor driver?