Mac OSX is a different kettle of fish. OSX is not so touchy with regards to a crash. However windows is very touchy about the system crashing. I've yet to have my OSX LW prefs become corrupted due to a system crash/freeze. And this happens rarely for me but can since I tend to use multiple programs at the same time. Particularly heavy is video conversion (mpeg2 conversions re: Final Cut Pro.) It happened just a few days ago (kernal panic attack) but no effect upon the LW prefs at all.