after 40 hours of rendering the last 9 seconds nothing is happening....

This is normal behavior, just let it do it's thing. I've seen it get down to 1 second, and sit there another couple of minutes, before finally finishing. Looking at my hard drive status light, I can see it's still working.

What I believe is happening is that it's encoding the video, then the audio, and then muxing the two into a single file. When it looks like it's just sitting there doing nothing, I believe that's when it's actually muxing the files.

Back when I used a Mac, I had the same issue with Compressor. It worked great for the longest time, but one time it crashed in the middle of an encoding. After that, it would crash with every encoding I tried.

Since you're having something similar happening with Premiere Pro, I'm betting it's on OS issue. Something got screwed up.

Hi I agree, that's why I went to the restore setting but I wanted to go to 10.7.2 not 10.7.4 apple won't even let me start up with an external drive that's really pissing me off I have a client meeting on Thursday i've been dicking with this since Sat. I'm so pissed off right now.

my other computer 10.6.8 is running along slower because I have the 6770 graphics card which is not supported with the Merc eng. but at least it's stable.

this is a laptop... i was testing the 10.7 which allows the merc playback to work and it does help about 15% but it's not been stable 2 weeks ago the PP would crash every 5 min just scrubbing video or anything I've been resigned to viewing at 10% size at 1/4 qty in the viewer. the 17" laptop is not an edit machine, I realize that but I was hopeful at first and with my life being able to take two laptops was really great and vs my 2009 tower the i7 is fast. The overheating genius at apple makes sure this is not possible but it's the big brother aspect that is pissing me off... I have just removed the hard drive so I can try to use 10.6 but really you can't start up using any external drives or any os if the internal is usable? What is that? Also, if you have not tried it, you cannot even get past 2 windows if you don't have a wireless network. What if mine is out which Time Warner goes out almost every day... I don't get all of this why is this harder?