OS X "application has unexpectdly quit" problem

For months now, I've been have a very frustrating problem with my PowerBook (Yes, I know that's a long time, but it's somethign that I keep forgetting about. Yes, I know).

Anyway, the problem is that whenever an alert box pops up in a program, that program WILL "unexpectedly quit" within 3 seconds. I have about 1 second to respond to the alert before the program locks up, then quits. This happens to programs in the foreground or background.

By alert box, I mean something like an error message where I'm prompted to hit OK or cancel. Open and save dialog boxes and the like do NOT trigger this problem. Only alerts/error messages.

A very typical example would be as such: in Safari, I type in an invalid web address, and an alert pops up telling me that "www.website.com can not be found." If I don't IMMEDIATELY click OK, then Safari will lock up briefly, the spinning beach ball will appear for a second or two, then the program quits.

This has happened in all manner of applications, inclduing but not limited to: Safari, Mail, iChat, Mozilla, iMovie, GarageBand, System Preferences, Software Update, Macromedia Flash MX 2004 (trial version), and Terminal.

This does NOT happen in Classic applications, and does not happen in the Finder. I've probably clicked the "submit bug report" button fifty times now, and most of the time I don't bother.

I'm completely at a loss to understand this. I meant to call Apple about it while I still had free phone support, but never quite got around to it.

This is on a 1.5 GHz 15 inch PowerBook G4. Started out with 10.3.2 installed and have installed all the updates that have appeared, so I'm now running 10.3.5. None of the updates have had any effect on the problem. I have 1GB of RAM, recently updated from 512MB. This also had no effect on the problem, so I don't think it's a memory issue. This also happens when only the finder and the one application are open, which further demonstrates that this isn't a RAM issue.

Repairing permissions doesn't help.

Anyone have any ideas? I resisted updating to OSX until the beginning of this year and have no real idea how to troubleshoot it (used to be good at troubleshooting OS7/8/9......oh well). Thank you in advance for your replies.

 

That seems to have solved the problem! Speech had been set to speak teh phrase "Alert!" on alert boxes. Turned that off, deliberately caused an alert to pop up, and it stayed without crashing for 30 seconds. Thanks!