This problem is caused by the Instant Hijack from rogueamoeba.com. This is an add-on for Airfoil and other applications from rogue amoeba (such as nicecast).

The solution is to stop the service with

sudo /usr/local/hermes/bin/hermesctl unload

IDEA 7.0 and 8.0 versions running on Intel Macs are affected when JDK 1.6 is installed.

There are also two other workarounds for this bug. Note that they may not work in your particular environment.

1. Run IDEA from the Terminal, using the command like: open /Applications/IntelliJ\ IDEA\ 8.0.app/ (the actual path may vary depending on your IDEA version and installation location). Starting IDEA by clicking on the Contents/MacOS/idea file (under the IDEA app directory) in Finder is also known to solve the problem.
   
2. Open Settings | Compiler dialog and add the -J-d32 to the Additional command line parameters field. It may not work if JDK 1.5 is used as a target. Try using JDK 1.6 as a project JDK and see if it helps (remove other JDK configurations from IDEA).