Well, we don’t have to submit to this madness anymore. It occurred to me that I could simply rename the spindump executable so that OSX could not find it. So I renamed /usr/sbin/spindump to /usr/sbin/spindump.disabled. I had to wait for my first crash in order to verify that this didn’t break anything, and sure enough I had a quicktime crash just the other night. The system promptly recovered from the crash and did not slow down as previously. Mission accomplished!