kraft4christ

Thanks.  I will do that and see what the outcome is and post results here.  Appreciate the feedback.

Being a newbie to this whole process, I'm not very familiar with what to troubleshoot for various issues.  I did try the repair disk permissions as suggested.  My Dell booted well, but within 2 minutes, it locked up completely.  When it does, I can't move the mouse, or type on the keyboard at all.  It's very odd.  It only does this with 10.6.8.  

Also, I actually did download Lion in safe mode.  Now my question is what is the best way to proceed trying to update my OS.  Should I upgrade/install directly and use xfail?  Or should I try to use unifail or myHack?  What's the best course to take?

After the installation, I upgraded the software to 10.6.8 to get the app store working. It did not work properly with 10.6.6. However when I upgrade to 10.6.8, the OS is very unstable and freezes every time randomly after the OS boots up.

When I start it in safe mode it will remain stable, but I am completely unable to download 10.7 from the app store. I'm trying hard to upgrade this computer to Lion. I'm stuck though. Any thoughts?