Memory issues -10810

(OS X 10.6.2 - FCP 7.0.1 on i5 iMac w/ 16 GB ram - already tried trashing prefs and repairing permissions)

I thought this problem would go away when I max-ed out the ram - but no.

Sometimes, I'll be able to work no worries with FCP, MOTION and AE all open at the same time. But other times, like today, I'll just have FCP open and I'll be unable to open ANYTHING else.

Not a complex project. Only two sequences. 30 second spots, DVCPRO50, 720x480, 4 tracks video and two tracks audio each. Nothing very complicated going on - plays back fine, no dropped frames.

But when I click on another application icon in the dock - nothing - no bounce - no launch.

I quit FCP and an error message tells me - unable to open... ...error -10810

and I can move on.

This didn't happen with my old dual core.

Anybody else experience this?

Error -10810 is a non-specific launch services exception code. There are three common causes.

1. You're exceeding maxprocperuid. Dashboard is often the culprit here. Close all your Dashboard widgets, especially third-party ones.

2. You have a misbehaving third-party Quicktime component installed. Remove all third-party Quicktime components.

3. You have some other piece of third-party software that's running in the background, and it's misbehaving. There were a ton of reports of this back when Mac OS X 10.5 was first released, because many third-party freeware developers failed to make sure their software ran cleanly under the new release. People installed the upgrade on top of their existing third-party software and chaos ensued.

These kinds of errors can be debugged to a high degree of precision, but doing so takes a pretty intimate knowledge of Mac OS X internals. If I had access to your system, I'd start with the various log files, then try to determine just which kernel limit is being exceeded and why. In the absence of that, though, try those suggestions.