Hard drive beachball problem for the 17"

Ok, so I know that there is already a few posts about this issue, (including the very large 96 page one) but I wanted to start a post for those of us with a 17" MBP that are having the same issues.

I was on the phone to a senior technician at Apple (Australia) today for about 2 hours trying to sort out this problem. Firstly he was a bit hazy about the issue to begin with assuming it was a RAM paging issue. Seriously, this thing has 4gb of ram, I think you would have to running so much stuff at once for it to legitimately run out of ram. I'm a web developer/designer so I can push the machine reasonable hard sometimes but I get the beachballs even when I only have safari and mail open. This is the fastest (stock) laptop Apple have ever produced, surely it can handle a bit of stick.

So I suggested it could be the hard drive/firmware etc and mentioned about the large amount of people on here with the exact same issue. After looking into some internal documentation he noted that there was indeed similar problems happening around the place but he seemed convinced that this only applied to 13" and 15" models and that the 17" never got the 1.7 firmware update.

After looking at the firmware page: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1237 it seems maybe he's right. I can't see my boot ROM version there anywhere (MBP52.008E.B05) The mid 2009 model 17" isn't on that list.

Whilst my friend at Apple is reasonably sure that my issue is software related and wants me to watch the console when Im having the freezing, I'm positive that I'm having the exact same problem as the 13 and 15s.

Can other people with 17" MBP that are having the same issue please post here so that we can begin to build a case for Apple to acknowledge the problem for our model too? Please add whether you have installed a 3rd party hdd or whether you are having the problem despite only having the stock hdd like me.

Thanks guys.