Series of 10.6 bugs related to erasing (formatting) an external drive

OS X Grab is a pretty simple utility, so I was quite surprised when it hung with a spinning pizza of death (SPOD, SBOD) on saving a screen capture.

Deleting preferences didn't help. I switched to the Admin account to test there, and it hung with a blue screen.

What the heck was going on?

The source of this and several other bugs, including a lockup the night before, was I was performing a 7 layer erase and FAT format on an external drive being recycled for donation.

It appears than several Finder/File system related operations in 10.6 will hang when an external drive is being erased.

I've been using 10.6 for a few months on my newest machine. It's not bad, but it's still not as stable as 10.5.