Just an update, and it may possibly throw some light on the subject?

Normally I boot in AHCI mode.

My Motherboard supports AHCI / IDE / RAID (I would ideally like to boot in RAID, but I can't seem to get this to work)

However, booting in IDE produced an interesting result.

Firstly the problems!

3-4 minutes boot time as oppose to 30 seconds! (lot's of pauses)
No DVD ROM found when booted.

The good news!!?

The system stalls stop and everything else seems to run fine!

Oddness... obviously not a fix... but something to go on maybe?

In the meantime I have also re flashed my bios to 17 (latest release 18) but to no avail.

I also tried using the voodoo kernels, again no difference - in fact the system seemed worse.

If anyone can help I'd really appreciate it!!

I may try installing my original ToH version (10.5.0 i think) that always worked on the same hardware, but isn't EPI and uses old 9.2.0 ToH kernels.. but maybe it will prove something... I don't know!?

One things for sure - I'm ace at installing OSX now!!

:S not sure that's something I want to be good at though!

Thanks again,

Jon.