iMessage constantly hangs, freezes and uses massive resources

Hi all

I've been using mountain lion since it came out. Running on a 2011 MBA, 256gb, i5 processor. Everything else runs smoothly (except sometimes Lightroom takes a while but I have a big catalog).

Every time I open my MBA and wake from sleep, iMessage hangs. Sometimes I wont even start using iMessage, but since it is frozen, the mac fan spins up and the whole computer slows down and heats up. Finally when I go into activity monitor to figure it out, I realize iMessage is not responding.

Several times now (and this is more recently) I have gotten an alert pop up saying "there is no more available memory" and then it gives me a list of active programs and iMessage is aways listed as not responding. Force quit sends everything back to normal and when I open iMessage again it is fine.

Does anyone have any idea what is going on? I use it a fair amount from all my apple devices and mac.

It has 4gb of memory, but this error occurs even before I open Lightroom to do any editing.

It literally happened - the "you are out of system memory" alert and then subsequent "not responding" iMessage - just before I posted this (that was the last straw) and all I was doing was reading an article on a website.

anyone?

Here is a screenshot of what I had when I opened my mac for the first time today. Get your $*#t together Apple. I paid nearly $2000 for this whole computer setup. Less time suing people, more time working on your software.