Thanks, but I'm not driving 60 miles and back, once to drop it off and once more to pick it up. Archive/reinstall may be a 1950's solution that'll take me a day, but it's less of a hassle than sending it to repairs. Even less of a hassle is to use that 3-year AppleCare plan I paid for...!
Anyway, I'm one step closer to solving it. As I mentioned it would freeze on login after reboot. I hard rebooted once -- same deal. On the third attempt, login worked, but then when I brought the machine back from sleep the login prompt froze and I got the perpetual beachball thing again. That's when I realized that on the first two attempts I wasn't around, so the machine had gone to sleep before I attempted to log on. The third time I was there and logged on immediately. So the problem is actually that it freezes when I wake it up from sleep. My energy saver settings are: Screen sleep after 15 mins, computer sleep after 30 mins. Screen saver: Arabesque, set to "Never" (no point as the screen is switched off after 15 mins...)
I thought it might be something with mounting my Lacie network drive, as this is the only, err... 'foreign' object the iMac has dealings with, so I removed that from the Login Items tab under my user account settings. Didn't help.
Well, admittedly my PC experience is 10 years longer than my Mac experience but I wasn't born yesterday. This is my third Mac since I got my first in 2004, and at my last job (a multimedia agency) we were about 20 PC users and 30 Mac users. And there's nothing in my first or second hand experience that justifies calling the Mac "rock solid". It's solid enough alright, but far from problem free. I've had my fair share of Safari and Finder crashes, networking issues, on all three Macs (and no, ckurowic, no 3rd party crap, no ShapeShifter, no DivX, that's not how I roll), and at my old workplace the loudest profanity outbursts definitely came from the Mac camp. This may have had more to do with Adobe's and Macromedia's crappy MacOS builds than the Mac itself, but still, it was pretty far from the rock solid heaven that life with a Mac is supposed to be if we were to believe the ads.
Not dissing the Mac, I'm fine with either platform, but sometimes a reality check is in order.
As for scaring off switchers, I could never do that job as well as the Mac community does. With a few rare exceptions such as yourself, it's hostile, condescending, isolationist, bitter, aloof, pre-emptively defensive, unhelpful and generally unpleasant. I probably would've bought my first Mac a lot earlier if I hadn't dreaded becoming 'one of them'. The whole "if you're not with us, you're against us" attitude and the preoccupation with mutual validation by exchanging rants about "Winbloze" is very off-putting. Probably because these behaviors are associated with insecurity rather than confidence.
