OS X 10.5.4 increasingly buggy - help!

[magicmartin]

Hello all!

I'm a newbie to this forum - so please be gentle if my post is in the wrong place.

I would consider myself quite experienced with my MBP which I've been using my MBP for almost 2 years. Flawless so far. Upgraded from Tiger to Leopard some time ago, no problems, etc.

In the last 6 weeks, however, I've been having an increasing number of seemingly unrelated problems that I can't solve. The "Genius" from the local Apple retailer looked at it but had no solution.

Symptoms are (appeared chronologically over the course of the past 6 weeks):
- OS X hangs on shut down for about 1 minute, then shuts down correctly
- Problems installing updates to Adobe CS3 ("... can't move downloads to secure folder location...")
- Crash of QuickLook Server Application on every start-up ("... may have been caused by the AviImporter Plug-in...")
- Increasingly long boot-times
- Contents of menu bar disappeared completely (except Spotlight, everything else disappeared, e.g. iStat, network, bluetooth, TimeMachine, Time, etc.); can't make them reappear from System preferences either

So far, nothing really bad happened but Im afraid that this might only be the beginning of the system falling apart.

Measures taken so far but without any effect:
- Reset PRAM
- Repaired Permissions
- Repaired Disk
- Ran OnyX

Any idea what can be the problem? How could I possibly solve this without a fresh install (afraid of losing applications, required time to perform, etc.)?

Thanks for your help!

Regards from Hamburg,
Martin

 

[AlexisV]

Can you retrace your steps and uninstall the last program you installed?

What happens if you create a new user and login using that?

Have you tried deleting caches with Linotype Font Explorer, and deactivating all fonts except system fonts?

 

[SpookyLars]

Any idea what can be the problem? How could I possibly solve this without a fresh install (afraid of losing applications, required time to perform, etc.)?

Before a fresh install, it's worth to install the combo update 10.5.4. Sometimes it helps.

 

[Chappers]

I know you've repaired permissions etc but just before all else try IceClean http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/31818

Go to maintenance menu - all maintenance tasks and reboot. Hope it works

Good luck

 

[magicmartin]

Thanks for all your suggestions and answers!

@Spookylars: I reinstalled the Combo Update. No change.
@AlexisV: unfortunately I cannot retrace what I did, when the errors started appearing. Actually, I don't remember installing anything at all in that period.
@Chappers: I installed IceClean and did what you suggested. That apparently corrected the problem with the menu bar. All apps are back.

However, none of the other bugs are any better. Quick Look Server keeps crashing, I can't update any Adobe application (btw: Adobe customer service has not bothered to answer an email I send over the customer service form on the website in a week...), booting and shut-down are still slow.

These problems are probably not related, but although they don't affect me much, they bother me because so far my Mac has worked great.

SMART status of my hard drive is ok, so I hope these errors are not a sign of the drive going south.

Any other clever ideas anyone?

Thanks again and regards form Hamburg.

Martin

 

[darkcurse]

Have you tried creating a separate user account and operating from that? Worse comes to worse, back up your data and rebuild your system from scratch I guess.