Mozilla applications cause my MacBook Pro OS X v.10.6.8 to freeze

[aldavewebbs]

Hi Guys,

During a Skype conversation I was having just yesterday my 2yr old Mac decided to Freeze on me ~ it has not been the same since.

The "rainbow-spinning-wheel-of-death" has come up so frequently in the last 24hrs that I am now reduced to running minimal applications on my beloved Mac...

1. I've reset my PRAM
2. I've verified & repaired the Hard Disk using Disk Utility on my MBP's Install OS X CD (Initially an "Invalid volume free block count" corruption was found on my Macintosh HD drive which has since been repaired and is OK again now)
3. I've even removed & upgraded my old versions of Skype, FireFox & Thunderbird which were all causing me issues ~ since these upgrades to the latest versions now only FireFox & Thunderbird seem to be causing my MBP to freeze! (Even with Airport disabled as well ~ which is pretty pointless anyway for apps like these!?)

Any ideas what I could do next ? I'm currently using Google Chrome to do all my "Internetting" tasks as this seems to keep my system stable but as soon as FireFox and/or Thunderbird are opened things go to pot again and most of my "running" processes simply get "stuck" and Mr Rainbow appears again!

Interestingly one instance of mdWorker always gets stuck too ~ I read on another post somewhere that reindexing my HD might help this.

Perhaps I should just upgrade to Lion now though ? I have everything backed up so this wouldn't be a problem to do, although I heard that putting my latest backup on a refreshed system might bring the problems I'm having back again! (especially as I backed up just after this problem started happening)

So I'm at a loss right now... please help wherever you can!

Thanks All
~Alex

 

[~Toby]

Same Problem? Malware?

A similar thing started happening yesterday to my (ancient) MacBook running 10.6.8. Bringing up Firefox (Mozilla) causes the left click to stop working which pretty well disables the machine for use. I can get to DiskUtility by booting in repair mode (option r while booting) and DiskUtility shows an Invalid Volume freeblock count usually off by some number less than about 12 blocks. I reboot from the Snow Leopard install disk and repair the disk, start up normally only to have the same problem recur the moment I start up Firefox. DiskUtility then shows the same problem.

Everything seemed to work fine for a while using Safari, but then the machine started failing in the same way and it now freezes when I reboot from the install disk.

With thoughts of malware I shut down my local net. (I don't know how to turn off airport without a working mouse.) I tried rebooting from the install disk several times without any luck. Finally I restarted the MacBook one more time to get it to eject the disc and suddenly the mouse is responding again. I quick turned of airport on the machine so it will stay off the net even when I bring the net back up. I've attached a USB drive and am making a copy of the users directory so I can have the option of doing a clean install. I've got TimeMachine backups from some months ago (been traveling - without the USB drive and just got back) but I don't want to touch those backups.

Anybody else out there seeing stuff like this? Is it possibly malware? Hard disk going bad? Something else?

~Toby

 

[Mr. Retrofire]

This sounds like a hardware related problem.

 

[escdrift]

10.6.8 is the issue.