Extremely strange Tiger crash

[andysmith]

About half an hour ago I was just working on some web pages, had Firefox, BBEdit, Transmit, Adium, and a few other apps open (Mail and Newsfire).
Adium crashed (not exactly a rare occurance )
I reopened it, but immediately noticed the fonts in the messsages were huge. I went into Adium's preferences and reset the font size, but then noticed the scrollbars had the buttons together at the bottom - but I'd set this in Appearence prefs to show them at the top and bottom.
Upon launching system prefs, I got around 5 messages with things like "There have been new settings set for Ink - do you want to apply them?" (something like that ). Nearly everything had been reset as I explored - my desktop background (although it hadn't 'refreshed'), and it wasn't seeing my iPhoto albums.
Getting nervous and reaching for my backup DVDs, I rebooted - and after logging on, everything was absolutely fine and as I left it

So I'm confused now. Has anyone had something like this happen before?
My theory is that the daemon that interprets the XML plist files (is there such a thing?) had somehow crashed.

 

[andysmith]

I've just had exactly the same happen on my PowerBook - which is running 10.4.1 now - so someone else MUST have had this problem?

I think I tracked down when it happens - this time, Firefox crashed - and on the 'Unexpectedly Quit' dialogue, I pressed the 'Try Again' button to relaunch the app. All seemed OK - until I saw that the scroll bars had the buttons together at the bottom, which wasn't my preference. So I opened up System Prefs, and yet again I had those 'Preferences changed' dialogue boxes, and all the preferences were at default. I was going to reboot, but iDVD was encoding a DVD - and it had been doing to for two hours, so I was waiting for it to finish. But then around 10 mins later, I thought I'd open up System Preferences again, and get a screenshot of the error to google later. But I didn't get the error - and everything looked absolutely fine, all the preferences were the same.

So now I'm confused - it's happened on two different computers, and I still don't know what it is...