Running Scrivener on 10.6.8. Scrivener seems to run fine, but OS X is hanging and needing to be forcibly restarted occasionally. Scrivener has itself crashed a couple of times. This never happened before I started using Scrivener. The computer is almost brand new, and I’m not running a bunch of applications at once.
Has anyone else experienced this problem? It seems very odd for an OS X application to be causing this.
It doesn’t install anything that runs in the background even while the program is closed, so theoretically nothing about Scrivener should be crashing your OS while it is closed. I don’t actually know of any bugs in Scrivener itself that will cause an OS crash, as you say, that would be very unusual. This typically only happens with programs that install modifications to the operating system itself. The two main things I’ve seen that can cause overall OS X instability are installing hacks (and to be honest that can be done by even a fairly normal sounding program, not just stuff that obviously sounds risky, like replacing the UI) or bad hardware. The latter can happen even if the computer is brand new. They do try to QC all of the components, but sometimes bad RAM and logic boards slip through quality control. Do you live in near an Apple retail store? If so you might want to bring it in and have them run some diagnostics on the hardware. You’ll be under warranty if it is new. Just remember to back everything up before you take it in as they won’t and if they replace a storage device you’ll be back to square one with everything.
Sometimes it feels that way. 
Ha.