The "depodding" step is really an essential test, as the pods have been culprits in several crash-or-hang reports on the forums. The pods were based on some whiz technology that is apparently common in many other Adobe apps, but from the users point of view "tacking them into" FM -- which has a very, very old, non-Adobe-originated codebase and a UI that is unlike any other Adobe app -- was a recipe for trouble. A heroic effort by the engineering team, but ...
While my original posting described problems with very "intense" FM files (with huge # of variables or huge # of Tables), the pods have caused trouble with even small files, as shown in other forum postings. For example, I believe cross-references is one example where having the pods open causes hangs. The problem isn't necessarily that the document uses any podded features, just that the pods being "active" cause instability all by themselves. Just minimizing them isn't enough, though, FM is still updating them in the background, so they have to be removed from the workspace completely in order for them not to use memory and consume CPU cycles.
It really doesn't take very long to get a "NoPods" workspace set up, just be absolutely sure that you follow this bit:
>> Two steps are needed in order to get FM to be correctly de-podded for a given user:
1. put the nopods.fws and .cfws into the user’s Documents and Settings location (location varies according to Windows version)
2. have the user open FM, open a new blank FM document, select the "NoPods" workspace, close the new document, and use File > Exit to close FM.
If #2 isn’t done, then the symptom is that FM won’t open existing files (either double-clicking in Explorer or doing File Open in FM’s menu) with nopods active, even though nopods files exist in the correct Documents and Settings location and even though FM will, however, open a new blank document and have the nopods correctly activated.
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Memory leakage is when FM uses memory to do some process but doesn't give it all back when the process is finished, which eventually begins to clog the works, making either FM or Windows slow and then unstable.
I personally would suggest that you reboot when you start to see any instability, not just close / open FM.
I don't think you'd find anybody where who would disagree that this instability should have been corrected, but now that FM10 is out I very much doubt there will be fixes for FM9. And unfortunately there's no way to say for sure that FM10 might have fixes the particular issue you're having.
And absolutely yes, most of us would agree that FM7.2 was indeed the most stable of all, it was built like a tank. That said, though, without the major new features incorporated into FM8 and FM9 (e.g. Unicode), FM would have been totally sidelined by now.
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