EARTHDESK  The Preference Pane is 64 bit (under 10.6), while some other parts are 32 bit which results in better performance. Most of the overhead is virtual memory (a memory mapped file) to hold the over 100mb of graphic data required for the displays. EarthDesk will release memory if it is needed by other apps.  
(Version 5.1)

EARTHDESK  Sadly, this was a great app that was just abandoned.

As a software company we made several attempts to buy the rights to this product when it was clearly not getting any development so that it could be kept alive. Most of our e-mails went unanswered.  
(Version 1.9.5)

EARTHDESK  There is a setting to control this behavior in the Display Tab. You an either leave the last generated image on the screen, or remove it to restore the original desktop.  
(Version 5.0.1)

EARTHDESK  Can you please contact us to supply more details about your hardware and some samples of what you are seeing?  
(Version 5.0.1)

EARTHDESK  This issue is related to a non-English setting in the Number format of the International Pref Pane in System Preferences. If it is set to English, all will be well.

The technical issue is that the cloud images contain an embedded date that must be parsed and the name of the month in always in English in the cloud image. That causes the parsing to fail and the cloud image is rejected as an invalid one... since EarthDesk makes sure the cloud image it shows is always more recent then the previous one.

We have a beta available to solve this and a public release is expected within a couple days as we hope to address a few other minor issues as well.

Thank you for your patience. This was a 100% rewrite and despite a month of beta testing, a few things escaped our testers.  
(Version 5.0)

EARTHDESK  Would you please contact us about this via our support page? We have not had other reports of this and it could be your settings. Note that during the cache building process, it will use much more processor power then after it is up and running.  
(Version 4.8)