Memory management problem?

[GUARDIAN]

Hi All,

I've been working on a project to get macosx leopard running on a HASSEE laptop.

I've been at it for about 2 weeks now, and finally have a booting system, with wifi, ethernet, PS2, USB, and the trackpad working fine.

The issue I'm having is a little hard to describe, I have searched the forum, but couldn't find anything, so I apologize if this has been asked before.

I'm using iATKOS V7, and have 1GB of ram, on a Pentium Duel Core.

OSX boots fast, and everything seems fine, Itunes is snappy, the Dock's animations are fast and smooth but certain things seem to trigger a compleate halt.

if I open Safari, it runs fine untill I go to certain websites (meebo and the firefox download page are good examples)

the moment I go to one of these pages, they will start to load (the firefox page gets about half way) then the hard-drive light becomes solidly lit, and the entire machine will just grind to a halt.. even typing commands into a console to kill the procsss takes a good 3 of 4 minutes.

Skype is another good example, It loads, logs in, then just hangs the whole system, again, the HDD light becomes solid, and the system slows to a crawl.

TROUBLESHOOTING SO FAR:
I have wached the system monitor while these apps do this, and nothing seems out of place, memory usage is fine, CPU usage is at about 1 or 2 %, Net I/O sits at virtually nothing.

The only thing I do notice is safari takes up 1.9G of virtual memory.

I've tried updating safari

I've tried installing firefox, but it only opens for a few seconds, then crashes back to desktop.

I've tried ther CPUS=1 kernel option

I've tried wiping and re-installing iATKOS from scratch

I've tried booting with the -f kernel flag

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I know this problem is solvable, as the first time I installed iATKOS it was not happening, this only happend after I tried upgrading OSX to 10.5.8, but I have done a HDD wipe and re-install since then.