I have tested and tested and isolated the cause of a complete Mac OS system Freeze is being caused by the starting and stoping of Corona SDK. I have isolated the issue so that it is the only thing running on a brand new macbook pro. The crash can easily be re-created by launching and then stopping Corona SDK and will occur somewhere between 1 and 11 start/stop events.

This happens no matter what app is being tested including the sample "hello world" app that comes with the simulator install.

Here are the versions of Corona and MacOSX below.

Has anyone else experienced this issue and are there any recommendations for getting around it? (I'm having to hold off on Corona Development because it's frustrating to have to hard re-bood my system during testing)

Corona Simulator Version 2011.591 (2011.8.2)

MacBook Pro
17-inch, Early 2011
2.2 Ghz Intel Core i7
4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Intel HD Graphics 3000 384 MB
Software: OS X Lion 10.7.1 (11826)

I am running the beta versions of Xcode, and IOS 5 (which should not matter, but I throw it out there out of despiration)

Just ran the new apple firmware update hoping that would help. NOPE. Upon stopping the 1st run of Corona SDK..... BAM complete system freeze and time to re-boot.

HELP. Am I the only one with this issue? I miss my Corona SDK!!!!!

Thanks.

So I am unable to reproduce your freeze running Lion (10.7.1). However, we don't have your exact hardware model or video card. Freezing issues are technically an Apple problem. Nothing we do is supposed to cause the OS to freeze. You should file a bug (Crash/Hang/Data loss) bug with Apple about this so they fix it ASAP.
https://bugreport.apple.com/

Does this freeze in Snow Leopard for you? If not, this is good information to include in your bug report with Apple so they know they have a regression problem and can better isolate the problem.

Meanwhile, if you can help us isolate what specific APIs cause the freeze, that might help us work around the problem. Right now we are completely blind. Historically, I see freezing issues are often triggered in the OpenGL driver (though not always).

Anybody else experiencing these problems, please let us know the hardware and OS version you are running and if something changes with other hardware or OS versions. And let us know the specific APIs that are freezing.

Just had a new thought...17" Macbook Pros have 2 video cards. You might try finding a utility or preference that let's you control which video card is used. I suspect the faster video card by default kicks in when running Corona since we use OpenGL. (That means you are using an AMD Radeon something.) Try using this utility to see if the different video cards cause different behavior with respect to the freezing.