[Osmium]

Just wanted to second this. Regular kernel panics = something seriously wrong. Either a hardware fault, or a bad kext or something. If anyone reading this has problems with OS X and stability, try running this:

http://khiltd.com/software/consultants_canary

It'll give you a list of every "non-standard" thing you have installed (e.g. kernel extensions), and between that and log files, it might help pinpointing the issue.

Apologies for being off-topic, it just seemed to be perverse to me to avoid upgrading because for stability reasons, when the new version should generally be more stable not less.

[ghshephard]

I think we can all agree that 10.6.8 was delightfully stable, and the first few versions of 10.7 were a bit of a clusterf*ck. My pain just went on a bit longer than most people. Lesson learned.