[sek929]

iMac w/10.6.8, fresh install on an SSD.

I've been booting back and forth from XP to 10.6, and lately my iMac has been hanging while shutting down or restarting while booted into OSX. All open apps will close but then the cursor just sits in my desktop and nothing happens for long periods of time. Pressing the power button just sleeps the machine, so I've resorted to sleeping and pulling the plug a few times. This last time upon firing the machine back up the fans kicked in at full bore, like I've never heard before, I quickly shut the machine down.

Boots great into OSX, lightning fast on the SSD, but this new behavior is worrying. Is this something a simply disk permission error could cause?

[jmiddel]

Nothing to do with permissions. Try booting in Safe Mode, holding the Shift key down on boot. It will take a while to start, because the OS is doing housekeeping. When done, simply reboot and see if things got cleaned up.

[CarenTec]

I think you should clean up your Mac drive. With the passage of time, lots of system junks, caches, universal binaries, language files etc..
You can find clean up tool through google. Let me know.