Guilty as Charged....
Okay, I am an optimistic idiot for installing Snow Leopard so quickly. My past experience has been so golden, that I think I set my expectations too high.
After 5 days of troubleshooting and yes I'll admit, occasional whining,... I have gotten SL 10.6.1 running smoothly on my iMac.
Running a clean install would be silly for me, as I have over 30 large 3rd party apps I use regularly on my machine. I was able to avoid this by backing up all my files to my external, deleting my user account and creating a new admin account. This took over a day, because of Snow Leopard's propensity to crash my old user.
Everything seems to be running very smoothly. I am letting go of my grudge. I foolishly opted to be a guinea pig, ALTHOUGH I think it would behoove Apple to perhaps add a hint of a warning on their merchandise, or a system scan to prepare the user for potential issues before the install.