strange problems...any insight welcome!

[eonxl]

starting yesterday, both safari and mail quit "unexpectedly" almost as soon as i open them. also things seem to be running really slow. it takes almost five minutes just to open MS Word. playing a video is a frustration in hiccups. any idea? i booted from my system disk and ran repair and it says everything is ok. however, one weird thing is that although i can run repair permissions find from the hard drive, when i try to run it from the boot disk, it gives me an error that i lost connection with the "disk utility application"... never run into that before.

any help is very much appreciated. is there a way i can re-install (and should i?) mail and safari without losing any data? are those files corrupted, even though disk utility doesn't show anything? thanks in advance!

--eonxl

ps. i'm running os x 10.3.9

 

[Rhisiart]

I'm on 10.3.9 too. I had exactly the same problem (actually Safari is still playing up, but this might be due to a different reason). It is interesting what you said about losing connection with disc utility. That baffled me too.

I tried everything you can think of. Nothing semed to make a difference. In the end I backed up everything I had and did a complete Erase & Install. Sorted.

P.S. Before re-installing my system, I used iSync to load all my stored URLs, address book settings, iCal etc. When I re-set up Mail after the fresh install, all my correspondence reappeared (just ensure your mail accounts are set to .Mac or IMAP).

 

[bobw]

There is a bug in Mac OS Panther 10.3.x and iTunes 6.0x that will prevent Disk Utility from repairing permissions. When you try to repair permissions, it will stop with a "Lost Connection" error. To fix this problem, simply remove the iTunes reciepts from the /Library/Receipts folder. Once removed, you should be able to perform repair permissions withtout any problems. Hope this helps, it took me several hours to figure out.


You can use Archive & Install to preserve your files.