Applications hanging all the time

M

maleercan

Registered
Hi
I am a recent Mac convert but have run into a problem- on Saturday morning I tried importing photos from my camera into IPhoto and it wouldn't start up.. sort of. I also noticed Safari wouldn't start. Since then I have found a few other problems. I'll describe the whole issue:
I am on a Mac Powerbook G4 17" running 10.3.7 (I inherited it from a colleague but with no Restore discs). There is 18GB free on the harddrive.

When I click on IPhoto or Safari to launch it, it bounces in my dock then settles with the little arrow under it (i.e. suggesting it has launched) however no window appears and no menus appear at the top.

Other symptoms are:
Installer can't load any info (it seems Onyx is a good app to have, but I cannot run it) if I launch an install a blank window appears with blank buttons.
Disk Utility launches but when I select my hard-drive it just hangs (the spinning 'busy' cursor makes me a bit nauseas after a while too).
Yesterday on IChat, the app would launch but I couldn't launch any text chat windows.

I have tried starting in single-user mode and doing an 'sbin/fsck' thing.

Does anyone know of any similar problems and solutions?

Thanks
Nathan
 
Do you have the macosx install disk? you can try running disk utility booting from the disk (holding c at the startup) then click on the apple and select disk utility, then run repair permissions on your volume...
 
Repairing permissions seems like a good place to start. In Panther you can do it from disk utility application the utilities folder (no need to use the install disk).

BTW welcome to the forum. I just re-read your post. Running fsck as single user should be just as good as running disk utility repair permissions.

So next step will be to create a new user and see if that clears up the problem. If things work well in the new user, it is probably a plist or some other preference in the original user, so move your data and you can delete the broken user.
 
i wrote that because he's having problems launching disk utility from his utility folder....
 
pds said:
Running fsck as single user should be just as good as running disk utility repair permissions.
Click to expand...
No... fsck is what Disk Utility does when you click "Repair drive." It has nothing to do with permissions.
 
Hi.
Cheers for posting replies.
I have discovered that it seems to be linked to ILife/ IWork/ Mac programs.
The following is a list of apps that aren't working: Safari, Iphoto, Imovie, Keynote, Ichat, Ical, Iblog, Mac Help and Installer (and other Utitlies).
I can only use certain operations in System Prefs too, like I cannot access User Accounts, which means I cannot create a new user!
Preview and Finder work OK though.
I guess they would integrate some browsing feature of Mac OS which must have become messed up.

I now have a theory that may give a clue to what's wrong. I was doing some video editing on Friday night in IMovie, and it didn't recognise a Codec in a couple of the Quicktime compressed movies and it shut down (no viruses in the the files).

Unfortunately I don't possess the sytem restore discs (the colleague I inherited this from is making noises like they ain't around anymore!). I guess I'll have to get a copy of OS10.3.7... and perhaps ILife and IWork...

Any last suggestions?

Thanks again.
 
Sounds like you need to do a clean install. Though I would have suggested not buying something unless you got everything included, especially the installation disks.

How much ram do you have? That might one other thing causing hangups.
 
Thanks Randman.
Don't fret though my buying habits are in tact - they can't be out of tact because I didn't by this! This is a business machine that I 'inherited' off a colleague in the US (I'm in the UK) - he probably has the discs lying around, but being a registered charity we can get pretty good prices on.

Thanks all.

I am gonna put this thread to bed now.

Seeya again sometime.
 
maleercan -

Being a fairly new Mac convert. I am going to offer some little preventative maintenance that will keep any OS X machine running in tip top shape. This will prevent future situations like the one you are in now.

1. First thing to remember OS X is based on a unix language based on BSD. Now, since BSD is the subsystem, and Unix has been around for a long time, OS X needs to be maintained. So, the first example, Tentano suggested a very good step in trying to help a sick OS X machine. This Apple article explains Permissions and Disk Utility pretty good. I personally use Disk Utility and Repair Permissions before every/all big software install and right after the install. This helps keep my Mac on the straight and narrow (software wise).

Now there are two different ways to use the Disk Utility to Repair Permission. One is open your Hard drive icon->Utilities->Disk Utility and highlight your startup drive and then select Repair Permissions. The other way is boot from you install disk and then use Disk Utility to do the same thing. Apple has very good article about how to do that.

2. Secondly, there are some routine maintenance scripts that run in most Unix variants, OS X is no exception. These maintenance scripts are called CRON jobs. Now, these scripts run on a running computer late at night (via your local time) and most people either sleep or turn off their computers at night (Unix was designed to run 24 hours straight). So, OS X users must force these jobs to run. Apple has provided a very good article about this. I personally like small one trick pony pony programs + freeware to run small tasks so I use MacJanitor. There are other programs that will do the same exact thing. So just go to VersionTracker and do a search for cron and you will see them.

3. OS X is not perfect and it is safe to say all computer operating systems are not perfect and some suck worse then others. :) So third party developers developed disk (CD) programs that fix OS X machines (unless a piece of hardware is toast). The two top programs I use (and most Mac users use) are Alsofts's DiskWarrior and/or Micromat's TechTool Pro 4. Both programs are very good in fixing OS x system and find bad hardware in your computer. One warning though, stay far away from from a discontinued product. It will hose up an OS X machine.

4. As a fairly new OS X user, maybe you should invest in a good OS X book. I personally bought David Pogue's OSX: The missing Manual. He is very good it breaking down OS X so anyone can take full control over an OS X machine. It was well worth the book price.


So sorry for such a long post. I just want to show people that with a little preventative maintenance, all machines can last for a very long time. Good luck on your problem.
 
Now there are two different ways to use the Disk Utility to Repair Permission. One is open your Hard drive icon->Utilities->Disk Utility and highlight your startup drive and then select Repair Permissions. The other way is boot from you install disk and then use Disk Utility to do the same thing. Apple has very good article about how to do that.
Click to expand...

This is incorrect. Repair Permissions should always be run from Disk Utility on the hard drive, not while booted from the OS CD.

The article linked there is for Reparing the disk, not Repairing Permissions.
This Article explains Repairing Permissions.
 
maleercan: Also check your available hard drive space. If it's below a gig, you're not going to be able to do much. I hope this is your problem because it is pretty easy to fix. DELETE FILES!!! You may have filled up your hard drive inadvertently with iMovie. I've done that lots of times.

You may even have to find the iMovie project where you captured lots and lots of video--and delete it. If you haven't erased the MiniDV tape deleting the project shouldn't be a major problem.

If your hard drive has liitle or no free space, the whole machine will be unhappy. No room for virtual memory swap files. You also risk data loss. As a rule of thumb, I leave at least 2 gigs free. I read somewhere it should be more like 10%, but until I get a bigger drive . . .


A couple comments:

Tetano: The Beast Within! (couldn't resist--one of the best games EVER--and I'm running it on my Mac still!)

Satcomer: Your post looks pretty helpful, but Unix is not a language. Neither is BSD. They're operating systems. I'm sure that was a typo.

Doug
 
You say you're a recent convert. Is this a new Mac? If not, have you recently added RAM?

My PowerBook G4 had similar problems, especially with iApps, when it was new. I ordered it from MacMall and had the "free" RAM. Well, the free RAM was bad. I did so many clean installs, permission repairing, etc, etc. The problems went away when I took out the free RAM. MacMall replaced the RAM chip and my 'Book has been stable ever since.

My iMac G4 also came from a catalog and it also had bad RAM (the free chip, not the one Apple installed). This RAM was so bad the computer crashed every time I tried to run an application. This time, I suspected the RAM straight off, took it out and the computer worked fine. Once again, the catalog company replaced the RAM.

Most Apple machines have two RAM chips, one user-accessible and the other one not. Try removing the user-accessible one. If that doesn't help (or that slot is empty), you might actually have bad RAM from Apple (or maybe it's not the RAM).

Mac OS X is so stable that hardware problems are easy to spot. Bizarre crashes are usually hardware-related. PCs have hardware problems, too, but how would you know it wasn't the software?
 
I got to this thread looking for an answer to my problem of the same a few days ago. I refused to reinstall the system because I refused to be defeated to the point admitting that I screwed up my machine and I don't know how.


Disk Utility ? Yes, it hangs when started from the Apps/Utilities, from the bootable CD it ran and found no problems. fsck in single user mode found no problems.

Running ktrace showed me little besides that applications were hanging in the midst of initialization.


Strangely, all apps that hung were Apple apps. Firefox ran, Photoshop ran, safari hung. ical hung, user prefs hung, Mail hung, GarageBand hung. The only non Apple app that hung was Illustrator.

Anyways after 3 days of puzzling over this I found that my fonts were overloaded with many duplicates. Some days before I "noticed" the problem, I let the system auto-update itself. Did this frig up the fonts ?

Removing the suspicious fonts and rebooting brought everything back to normal.

Its not the first time fonts brought applications into misbehaving. I really need to get a knack of how to manage fonts well. After that, perhaps one day I'll get this machine to print pictures with the proper colors, or print from Quark reliably ...
 
Well thanks to everyone else whose chipped in even after I said I was going to leave it!

HOWEVER YOU ALL WRONG!! There is no way any of you could have spotted this...
Some of the behaviour I thought looked a bit virus related HOWEVER it was actually Anti-Virus related. Norton Antivirus had gone wrong and was eating over 80% of my processor... and stopping me launching all the mentioned apps.

I know, I know viruses don't exist for Mac - or so everyone says. However I have a nice long list of them! and as I send out data discs burned on this Mac I have to scan them.

Ah well, problem solved!
Thanks to all the friendly Mac users out there who have offered advice.

Seeya later.
Nathan
 
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