Been meaning to make a sticky for this... as it still seems to come up quite a bit.
The workaround is to remove the file:
\users\YourUserName\Library\Preferences\com.autodesk.Maya-2011-x64.plist
Or if that doesn’t do it, the other Autodesk files in that same directory.
This won’t fix all Mac performance problems at this time, but it may help some people.
http://www.thnkr.com/wiki/index.php?title=Com.autodesk.Maya-2011-x64.plist