Snow Leopard app crashing left and right?

karavite

karavite

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iMac, 2.66 GHz, 4 GB RAM, OSX 10.6.5 installed over 10.5 six months ago

I have had intermittent crashes of Chrome, but now and experiencing more frequent application crashes with everything from Mail to TextEdit. textEdit is now very weird - when I open it opens with my last doc, but I cannot Save it or do almost anything without it crashing. I also had the computer freeze with a blank blue screen when I came back to it the other day. In addition, now my computer will not go to sleep from a user login, but when I log out I can select sleep from the user login panel and that works. All very odd and not fun.

Are there inherent issues with 10.6 and was I foolish to get it, even after it was out for a while?

Any suggestions? Please note, the days of enjoying troubleshooting or reinstalls are way behind me. So, if I should just do a complete clean install, I would rather do that then guess and experiment endlessly. I booted in safe mode, repaired permissions, all with no apparent effect. <rant>I'm a little peeved that 10 years after starting to use OS X and loving it to death, I now have the most unstable OSX computer yet. </rant>
 
Mac OS X quality is definitely declining but you sound like you hit something else.

I would try trashing the Preferences for the particular app. Make sure the disk verify is good and permissions are good. If you have the patience, boot from the CD and 'repair' the drive. If it doesn't need repair then it will be the same as a verify but if it does, then it saves a step. A bad file system can do very squirrelly things.

If all that doesn't help, then I agree... reinstall fresh. I would do a one pass data verify on the disk too (I can't remember the name of that option but when you reformat the drive, there is an option to make 1, 3(?), or 7 passes over the drive to find bad blocks. One should be enough.

Good luck
 
karavite said:
Are there inherent issues with 10.6 and was I foolish to get it, even after it was out for a while?
Click to expand...

Well, it sounds as if your hard drive might be dying an old Hollywood death scene.

To check I run the built in fsck -fy on the drive to see if it is in good shape.
 
Thanks you two. Ah, nothing like two somewhat opposing opinions with each worth investigating :) (but of course I would really really want to believe Satcomer is wrong!). I trashed Chrome prefs and updated Chrome and it works fine now. I trashed TextEdit preferences and it is now fine. I verified the disk with Disk utility and it said it was fine. I have repaired permissions a few times.

Sleep is still an issue. I discovered that when logged on it WILL go to sleep, but it is very weird. I select sleep, then nothing happens, that is until I click somewhere/anywhere, then bam, right to sleep. If I log off, then select sleep from the logon screen, it goes right to bed normally. Therefore, is it safe to assume something is running when I am logged on that interferes with sleep? What could it be? What is the best way to check? I tried some other suggestions I found about trashing power management prefs and scheduled wake up events, but no luck there.
 
Oh man. Sitting here tearing my hair out and my wife casually mentions how she was printing two days ago, but we ran out of ink, so she turned off the printer. Turns out she had a print job in her account just sitting there, going nowhere. I deleted it and now the computer sleeps normally!!!

I'm trying to rationalize away the app issues and that one time of having a blank blue screen as pure coincidence, bad luck and independent events. This computer has been great, but I will keep my eye on it. Apologies to Snow Leopard developers for my rant, but you do need to get a little more QA into your work.
 
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