Strange problems with Google Chrome on new MacBook

I've been using both Google Chrome and Chromium on my MacBook 6,1 (with Snow Leopard 10.62) for many months and never had any serious problems.
Indeed, while waiting for a more stable version of Opera 10.5 for the Mac, Chromium had become my browser of choice on this machine.
However, just in the last few days Chromium has started to run into some intermittent problems.
Well, actually there are two:
1. Occasional very slow browsing where "resolving host" is visible at the bottom of the page for a minute or more. Now this sounds like a DNS problem and indeed adding the IP to the address bar overcomes this problem. However, I've set up my network preferences to use the OpenDNS servers and doing "dig google.com" in the terminal shows that these servers are truly in use.
Now even after the host has been resolved (or I use just the IP in the address bar), I still have to wait for the page to be rendered and this too can take a minute or more.
What's going on?
Remember that it's only intermittent and sometime it works perfectly.
Clearing browsing data (Chrome>>Clear Browsing Data) does nothing to resolve this problem.
Plus, Opera 10.5 Beta doesn't exhibit the same problems at all as neither does Safari.
However, Chrome does (I'm using 5.0.307.11 Beta).
This problem I've seen even though I've changed my Chromium daily build three times recently and the problem persists. What I'm using now is 5.0.341.0 (40245).
What's worse is that I can't find any other references in Google to this problem. So, am I the only one?
2. On Chromium, but not on Chrome, opening a new tab just gives me a blank white page (I'm using the Speeddial extension) rather than opening on the Speeddial page. Once again, occasionally, it works fine.
I have no explanation or resolution for this