iMac 10.6.3 takes 15 mins to reboot, loses most preferences and system preferences.

[Alexign]

For about a week now, every time I boot my iMac mid-2007 20" running 10.6.3 I get the following problems

-Booting takes about 15 minutes of seeing the apple logo, and a bar that fills slowly under it...
-When it finally boots all the dock icons are reset to the ones you get with a brand new mac, spaces and expose is reset as well.
-Spotlight reindexes Macintosh HD.
-Adium loses all contact icons
-Mouse loses all it's custom settings.
-Login items are gone, I have tried not to re-enable those.
-Shut down takes about 10 minutes as well, while I see only the blue screen of shut down...

It seems that it is losing more and more settings every day. Today I had to turn on time machine again, although it was on before shut down...

Is this like losing an application support folder or something like that?

Applications do not seem intact as well.
Safari loses all web screenshots from cover flow
iTunes reupdates the library etc....

What's up witn all these?

 

[BlueRevolution]

Try repairing permissions with Disk Utility.

 

[ruk110]

i have been getting VERY similar if not same symptoms on my mac mini. i am running .11 version tiger but right now upgrading to leopard as i type to see if that will fix the problem..

 

[whooleytoo]

Is anything showing up in your Console which might indicate a problem?

 

[JediMeister]

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3148

 

[ruk110]

perfect fix

dude i split partitioned my hard drive in two. Re-formated one half and put snow leopard on it as a disk image then ran that up in target disk mode to install it. Now i got a fully working and restored Mac Mini!!