C2D weird locking up/freezing/hanging?

Hey everyone,

I have been experiencing some weird locking up/freezing/hanging when using my Core 2 Duo. The first couple of days after I got my MacBook Pro and after using the Migration Assistant I would get locking up -- the machine would go in a state where some functions are working (like the mouse, you could move it around) but everything else would not be available to use.

This meant that I could move my mouse around but can't click on any windows, any buttons, can't type anything in and the dock doesn't magnify, nor do its icons work. Since I can't click on the Apple menu to log out/restart/shut down, I have no option but to force a shut down by holding onto the power button.

This happened twice within 4 days of owning the machine, so I reformatted and moved everything over from my old PowerBook G4 manually -- reinstalled all my apps manually, copied my mail over manually, all my data over etc.

This freezing or whatever hasn't occurred until 15 mins ago, so there has been about 2 weeks between lock-ups. Up until now, I put the previous lock-ups down to something that perhaps was copied over from the PPC side of things over to the Intel side that the MBP C2D didn't like.

But now this is really weird. I can't remember what I was doing the first time the machine locked up, and I think I was command-tabbing through open apps the second time it happened and as I released the keys it froze then. The third time this happened (today), I was doing the same thing as the 2nd time.

When it did this today, I was listening to a podcast, and when the machine froze the podcast was still playing! So clearly half the machine is unresponsive, while some other parts of the OS and apps are still working. Unfortunately I didn't have Activity Monitor open during any of the locking up, so I can't see if there are any wayward applications.

Could this be a graphics problem? Maybe the drivers or the video card is a little dodgy? I sometimes get graphics corruption as well, either in Safari with the tabs showing up as black rectangles, or once when I woke up the machine from sleep the usual black background for the Username and Password dialog box was "coloured random static". I also sometimes get graphic rendering bugs in pages in Safari -- there would be a "line" missing from the browser screen, but scrolling up and down again usually corrects this.

This has never happened to me on my PowerBook G4, and find this rather odd. Anyone got any ideas? If anyone needs more information I'll be more than happy to provide.