I have been having no end of troubles with Maya 2009 to the point where I am considering going back to 2008.
(1) The most annoying problem is I am crashing when rendering. I get a message about running out of memory, but I can render the same model on my old machine running 2008 with half the memory and three generations back on graphics cards and cpu!
(2) I seem to get A LOT more maya crashes and have to save every couple minutes. I rarely every crashed with 2008.
(3) This one is really driving me nuts - when I select a poly object all the lines are dashed like I have display softedge mode turned on. I can select the obj and pick make all edges hard and the edge all become solid again. As soon as I press 3 for display smooth mode and then go back to 1 low res mode all the lines are dashed again!
This is either some funky mode I got into by accidentally hitting a hot key OR a graphics problem because on my laptop running 2009 I do not have this bug. Bit it annoys the hell out of me!
In general I have found 2009 to be pretty unstable and the SP1 patch did not seem to fix anything for me.
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Sir Isaac Newton, 1675