As far as the APE business, I found none of those file paths.
I verified my volume and it found a problem, so I repaired the volume and repaired permissions.
Unfortunately, I still get the spinning beach ball of death when I boot.
While that's going on I can command-tab and see finder in the list. I can click on spotlight but can't type into it. Do you think there might be a way to have Console load soon after finder starts, so I can see console messages?
This is like what happened when I tried upgrading to Leopard instead of installing fresh. There was no APE then either.
This is a G4 powerbook by the way.