Security Update Broke My Mac

Factor41

Wishful Drinking
Hi, I did a Software Update and downloaded a few items the other day - iTunes update, a security update and a couple of other little things and now my Finder is utterly monged and all my apps keep crashing. In the Finder, I can navigate around using the keyboard, but if I click on any icons or try to drag anything, it restarts itself (just the Finder, not the whole Mac). I can drag over stuff to highlight them, delete, create folders and all the normal stuff, just as long as I don't click on anything. Also having crashes from Safari, Internet Explorer, Mail, Dreamweaver, pretty much everything. Was rock solid before I 'upgraded' and it's getting pretty tiresome now. Anyone got any ideas how to fix this? I should have Tiger with me shortly so I'll probably end up redoing the whole system, but it would be nice to sort this out in the meantime. I'm running 10.3.9 on a G4/867.
 
Have you done all the routine maintenance/troubleshooting things, like repairing the disk, repairing permissions, creating a new user, etc.?

Also, what "little things" did you install? Anything like a haxie or something that modifies some function of the system?
 
Repaired the permissions, Disk Util reckons all my drives are a-ok. The little things were just other stuff on the Software Update. Can't remember exactly, but prob just quicktime update or something (I have QT7Pro). Nothing that should have broken the system.

How would creating a new user help? Don't they leave files on your drive when you delete them? There is a second user on the system already, but I haven't tried that yet, might give it a shot, but it's just a user account with no privileges for my dad to use.
 
Creating a new user could narrow the problem down to some preference or file specific to your user. If the new user works, then the problem probably lies somewhere within your original user account, and is not a system-wide problem.

Under Panther and Tiger, new user creation and deletion is a lot cleaner than under Jaguar. The user's home folder is deleted when you delete the user (or can be deleted manually after deleting the user in the System Preferences), so nothing remains.

Your Dad's account would be perfect to try, so it looks like you may not need to try the new user thing. If the problem does persist under your Dad's account, it wouldn't hurt to give a newly-created user a shot.
 
That most recent system software update has had question marks floating over my head as well.
I've been away from my own machine for days since then fixing another system. Once I got back to my own, my accounting software started acting funny and creating odd files at startup and save that prevented me from using it as well as crashing. Come to find out today almost EVERY Graphcs app I tried to open a file from would crash the app.
Right now the only thing that's worked after a permissions and a disk verify/repair is a fresh system folder. The techtool that comes with applecare is not that compatible with tiger so it's not a boot from option. I haven't gone through the previous system folder yet and I'm not looking forward to it either. Console gave me this message

"Attempt to release a printing object without first doing a retain!!!"

a google search with that message brought me to this board.

I hope this info is usefull to someone.
 
If you're running a wacom tablet follow these instructions and update the driver for tiger.

I just reinstalled a new system folder and narrowed my "app crash on open"
problem down to that. A bad driver for my wacom tablet.

Aug. 01, 2005 was the last tablet update for my model. I'm now caught up to date system wide, things look good.


::angel::

http://www.wacom.com/productsupport/select.cfm
 
Back
Top