OS X :: Finder And Other Programs Crashing When Viewing Certain JPGs?

I've got a problem with my Mac - it's a 2.1ghz Macbook (not the new type, the polycarb one) running Snow Leopard 10.6.4 and all of the latest updates. Well, apart from the newest iTunes version as for some reason it won't let me install that...anyway.

Whenever I open a folder with a large number of JPGs in it (about 300, 700mbs worth) in Finder, it only loads that screen of thumbnails. Scrolling up and down will crash Finder for about 3 minutes until those thumbnails load. Trying to Quick Look any of those images will crash Finder completely and bring the whole machine to a standstill with the spinning pinwheel - in the end, it will quit with a EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGBUS) message.

This has only started happening recently. At first I thought it was a problem with Finder, but if it's causing other apps to crash then it's something else...

Opening any of the images in that folder with an app such as Xee will cause that app to crash with the same message.

I've done these things so far:

- Delete preference files

- Clear all DSTOREs from the boot volume

- Reset SMC

Looking at the problems other people have had, it points toward possible bad RAM although the BAD ACCESS message seems to be fairly generic.

I've had a Mac for about a year now and I can't count how many problems I've had like this. Most of them have been solved by Google-ing the symptoms, but I'm at a dead end with this. The last Software Update prevented the machine from booting past the loading screen so I've already had to reinstall once. In the two years before I had my Dell with XP, I never had any problems, however small...and I've had to hard power down this thing due to software crashes more times than the Dell. If these problems are part of Mac ownership, it's a shame as I really like it, but I'm going back to XP otherwise.