actually adium is really terrible when it decides to mess up, I have noticed my fan whirring away from across the room and found adium using 70-80% of the processor until its force quit.
but yeah, its still cool.
tabs make it more likely you (or at least I) will be loading more pages at the same time and therefore using more system resources, but it has nothing to do with the tabs themselves, they just make for a more efficient use of desktop space
are you just sending really really long messages?
has someone with aim been warning you? I remember it gives a similarly worded error when you 'get in trouble'
hotmail works fine with my safari.
are you using the default fonts in safari?
do you have a global css set somewhere?
not using english as the language for osx?
thats very strange, it should load in seconds at the most with a good connection.
are you at a college that has some deal with napster or something? I wouldnt be surprised if a condition of it is no other music stores on the network
I do both on a more or less irregular basis, and although the icons go back to normal after a restart or logout its not really a solution. oh well, I think Ill just have one non default icon in my sidebar for now, so the blank folder is always it
on a pc you can use a higher speed ram, it will just run at the speed the system tells it. Im assuming this wont work with osx though, just because its such a bitch regarding ram