Why is Lion OS always hanging on MBP?

I am NOT happy with Lion!!!
Rarely if ever had a problem with Snow Leopard. Wanted to take advantage of my iCloud with iPhone, so I upgraded to Lion.

The first of many hangs resulted in the OS just randomly (or seemingly randomly) spinning the color wheel and not responding.

On the Snow Leopard OS I could always open Activity Monitor and kill any process that was not responding.... but in Lion the Activity Monitor will not open... in fact the wheel will spin for hours if I let it.

So multiple times, I had to do a hard shut down (holding down the power button). After a few times of having to do this my hard disk Crashed... Was the Hard Drive going bad before all this?... I doubt it.

Thankfully all my stuff is backed up so no worries there.

So, I installed a new hard drive... installed Snow Leopard from my CDs... then I upgraded to Lion.... I didn't install any apps, software or the like... it was as pure an upgrade as possible... and it STILL it has stability issues and hangs several times a week....

WHAT THE **** IS GOING ON?
I don't need iCloud this bad... it's been painful and I am SO close to reverting back to Snow Leopard...

Somebody, PLEASE, tell me what patch, or setting I need to adjust.

Thanks for listening to my rant.

What are the specs of your MBP? I put Lion on my 2008 MBP along side Snow Leopard (dual boot) and put Lion on my wife's 2009 MBP with no issues whatsoever. On mine, I partitioned my HD and did a totally clean install, not over the OS. On my wife's I wiped her HD, and installed Lion totally clean from a thumb drive I made out of the Lion download.

IMO, that is the best way to install a new OS. On a freshly formatted HD and not over a pre existing OS. That's just me though, I'm fairly OCD about it.

Doug

PS http://www.redmondpie.com/make-os-x...ive-sd-card-in-one-click-with-lion-diskmaker/

I have done Lion updates using both a clean update and over existing SL and programs on two different machines. Had some minor issues but nothing like the OP.

Are these hangs also occurring while the Mac is booting? If so try booting in Single User mode (command S) and report the text on the screen at the time it hangs.

Doug-

My MBP is 15-inch, Mid 2010
2.4GHZ Intel Core i5
4GB 1067 MHz DDR3
Intel HD Graphics 288 MB
Mac OS X Lion 10.7.2 (11C74)

CAn you tell me what IMO is?
And how would you proceed if you were me?

I do have a couple of external HDDs so moving stuff off is easy... just advise me as to what is the easiest way to restore all my iTunes, docs, pictures, etc...

Thanks,
Dave-

Slydude,

Yes, sometimes on boot up... Like last night: I have a password protect, so I typed the password, and right after I hit RETURN it went off into the weeds... spinning wheel and same login screen... I had to do a hard shut down... it's really BS... It's almost as if it's trying to run EVERY app I own... And even though I turned off the "Restore windows" setting in the System Preferences... it still has the box checked (by default) on shut down.