Disk Utility Constantly Crashes on Mac 10.7.1 Lion

I see nothing in your Report that gives me a clue to the cause.

Whenever I have unusual behavior like this, I reboot in Safe mode, then restart normally.

Safe mode startup is a very useful fix-almost-all-OS-problems tool. It does a Repair disk during the boot process, and is faster than booting from an external drive to run DU-Repair Disk on the internal drive.

Disk Utility is an app native to the OS. When it or any other native app misbehaves, you should concentrate your repair efforts on the OS. When booting in Safe mode, all 3rd party additions are "disconnected", and only the base functions of the OS are activated.

My second effort at fixing this problem would be to re-install the latest Combo update. This will do a similar thing - revert any intentional or inadvertent changes to the OS back to the default state, without affecting your data and most settings.

Third, if you have a relatively current external backup clone, you might try booting in that drive to see if the DU problem persists. If the problem is not there, you can clone that drive to the internal drive and restore current data from Time Machine.

Those folks that are Terminal-savvy may offer better solutions.

Hope this helps.

FWIW, I've noticed that the reason the Disk Utility appears to "hang" is because there are a large number of images/dmg's listed in the left panel (the Most Recently Used listing).

I'm not sure why having a large number of these files causes a problem, but I have certainly seen that time machine sparse bundles (in particular) make the load time very slow.

I (unfortunately) dont know a way clear the MRU other than open DIsk Utility, right-click the item and select "Remove".

Little comfort I know, but maybe this will help someone else :)