HELP* problems w/keychain/mail/itunes OSx10.3.5

[thepreludedude]

hi, i hope this is in the correct place (if not, mods would you please move it, thanks)
i have a imac g3 600mhz running OSX 10.3.5. anyway i go to use my computer tonight and i click on itunes. all of my 1200 songs are gone. there is nothing in the library or playlists. there are still mp3 files in my music folder.
then after this my mail started acting funny. the little wheel that spins when checking for mail kept on spinning. i try to send emails and usually when i type a few letters of the email address it fills out the rest. well tonight, nothing. i had to type everything. i checked my address book and it is completely empty?? now the mail app keeps asking for passwords on the email accounts. i put them in and it still asks me again. then it says it was rejected.
when using safari, it too is unable to access my passwords.
i went to keychains in the ultility folder and there is nothing there??
wth, is going on? i ran internet cleanup app and it found nothing.
what should i do to get this back to 100%?
thanks. sorry if this a real newb question. i really appreciate all help.
-roger

 

[thepreludedude]

 

[thepreludedude]

well i did a clean install. everything seems good now. wish i knew what made this go crazy.

 

[wrldwzrd89]

well i did a clean install. everything seems good now. wish i knew what made this go crazy.

I suspect that corrupt permissions, corrupt preferences, or both were to blame. Corrupt permissions can be fixed by going into Disk Utility, selecting your main hard disk, and clicking Repair Permissions. Corrupt preferences are fixed by deleting the offending file(s).

 

[thepreludedude]

I suspect that corrupt permissions, corrupt preferences, or both were to blame. Corrupt permissions can be fixed by going into Disk Utility, selecting your main hard disk, and clicking Repair Permissions. Corrupt preferences are fixed by deleting the offending file(s).

hmmm. that was way over my head, LOL. thanks for the reply
so, is this just something that happens? or can it be prevented?

 

[beatle888]

the problem with mail....ive had many times. it will work fine for months then all the sudden i get an error saying that the server cant recognize my password or something like that....i dont remember how i was able to solve the problem but it would always come back.

i cant believe that this isnt a know issue here at macrumors. i would think that people would chime in with a simple solution.

my solution however was to turn to the dark side. i now use entourage. i wish apple would fix things like this. its such a consumer level problem and if their trying so hard to make people believe that apple is the answer to simple and powerful computing then they better give us a mail application of all things that works with their keychain app.

this has pissed me off many times. oh and sorry you had to do a clean install. i hope permissions wasnt the problem cause thats easy to fix.

 

[wrldwzrd89]

hmmm. that was way over my head, LOL. thanks for the reply
so, is this just something that happens? or can it be prevented?

Various things can cause permissions to get messed up. The only thing you can do is repair permissions regularly to try to stay on top of it.
Preferences can also become corrupt for various reasons. The most common cause is an application unexpectedly (or was forced to) quit while writing to its preference file. If this happens, find the preference file for that application (it will have the application name as part of its filename) and delete it, then launch the application - it will create a new preference file free of corruption, but you'll lose all your custom settings.