Why Can't Growl Actually Work?

So there's this great application for the Mac called Growl.  In my opinion this is a must have for all mac users.  It adds great functionality to nearly all applications either through built-in support or through outside plugins and applications.  Growl itself mimics the built in feature of outlook to pop a notification (on the right I believe) when an email is received through Microsoft Exchange email.  The difference is that this service works for EVERYTHING you can think of.

Pretty much every application out there has a plugin of some sort to function with growl.  For fb it can tell you when someone writes on your wall or sends you a message or whatever, for gmail it tells you when you receive an email.  With iChat or Adium, when someone IM's you and when someone signs online.  There's a plugin for iTunes to display a popup with the song info when you're playing a new song.

Essentially Growl is really handy for notifications.  However, unfortunately, it isn't perfect.  Growl freezes constantly for me (sometimes every hour, and when this happens it hogs my computer's CPU).  This is a major problem.

While I do love Growl, I wish it worked better so that I could actually rely on it successfully.