Apple Apps choke, must be force quit. Second time, any help?

J

joshua

Registered
Hay caramba!

Okay, here's the machine:

iBook 600, Combo Drive, 384 MB RAM, OS X 10.2.3.

After a crash, *ALL* Apple Apps simply refuse to function. All of them. iCal, Mail, Safari, TextEdit, etc... all choke. The applications open, no display information, the menus cease to work... Force quitting them is the only way to ditch the application.

This has happened once before, but last time it was 10.2 fresh install. Internet Explorer crashed and then on reboot, this is what we experience. Diagnostic apps and preference trashing prove to be of no use.

We actually initialized the disk and did a complete clean install of the OS hoping that would fix the problem, and it did.

It's been working fine for the longest time, but then suddenly it happens again! This time while switching to another application, the Dock spontaneously restarted and the machine froze.

We don't want to have to re-install the bloody OS again. More to the point... if we knew what was causing the problem in the first place, we could perhaps avoid it.

I'm out of my element with OS X. I've been using Macs for years (since System 6 was a new thing), but we sold the older macs to buy this one for my wife. I'm stuck using an older machine until we can afford a second new Mac.

Searching Apple's support dbase is useless (no surprise there), the local techs are stumped. The only thing they can do scratch their heads and say "Re-install" -- which is what we've done and will likely do again. Needless to say it's a huge pain in the ass and we're pretty miffed that it happened at all, let alone happening TWICE!

OS X is great while it's working, but there are some huge problems that simply are not yet addressed. Are we the only ones who have experienced this..?

Any takers, we're at the end of our ropes.

Thanks in advance,
joshua
 
Hmm, I'd theorize it had something to do with your added RAM if the symptoms didn't disappear after a fresh install. Occasionally there have been some bad-behaving apps that deleted the /tmp shortcut, requiring people to go to the Terminal and type:

sudo ln -s /private/tmp /tmp

Most notably, the first beta of Safari was known to do this. Get the newest versions of all applications and 3rd-party add-ons, including the new Safari released today.
 
first, what "diagnostic apps" did you use?
i'll also assume that you haven't installed ny linux systems or emulators as some of these cause conflicts as reported elsewhere on this site.

are you sure this is just apple apps? and are you sure it is all apple apps? does this happen both with and without the classic layer being booted?
 
A little clarification. I was a little heated in the first post.

It isn't *every* Apple App. iTunes, iMovie, and iPhoto are not affected.

Can't try classic because OS 9 isn't installed.

Tried RAM in the past. We pulled out the module and reinstalled last time.

Diagnostic apps were Drive 10 (useless) and System works 2.0 those made the problem neither better or worse. I'll look into imcompatibilities more as I've just come across this site today. I've had my head intentionally buried in the sand for a while I was a bit burned out on tech. I haven't even played with any *nix apps as my knowledge is purely academic. I have no real practical administrative experience with command line OS's.

We're going to try creating another user to see if the apps work. It's occured to me while writing this that all of the apps that are affected have a folder in the user directory. Perhaps there's some file corruption happening there.

We run the machine as a single user machine... no need for multiple users.

We'll try this and let you know. In the interim, any further suggestions are greatly appreciated! :)

Cheers!
Joshua
 
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