What just happened to me is by far the weirdest thing that I've ever experienced as a computer user.
About a week ago, I had what I assumed and the Apple Store concurred was a hard drive failure of the usual spurious sort. My computer wouldn't boot from the drive- it seemed to hang at the silver Apple logo with the little 'progress wheel' cycling for all eternity- and Disk Utility on the Tiger install disc displayed the same behavior, as far as freezing and the progress wheel are concerned. The Tiger installer itself wouldn't recognize the hard drive.
Apple replaced the hard drive under warranty to solve this problem.
Exactly the same symptoms happened a few hours ago. This time, the difference was that I left the Tiger installer alone for about half an hour while I frantically researched for anyone with a similar experience on the PC in the other room. When I came back I noticed the hard drive had appeared. Disk Utility ran, checked out perfectly, and then I restarted and booted up with no problems or no lost data.
Then I made a connection: both supposed hard drive failures had occured a few hours after I attempted to install StuffIt Expander 9.0.2, and the installer crashed with a 'File not found' error. It seems bizarre that your software could have caused a problem like this, but it's the only way I can explain it.
I'm not bitter at you for the data loss caused when my hard drive was replaced, but I urge you to attempt to replicate and fix this bug. Although easy to deal with (if patience is the only remedy necessary, as in my second experience) it is SERIOUS and quite frightening.
The first 'failure' occured under Mac OS X 10.4, the second under 10.4.1. Both were fairly fresh installs.
