OSX hanging all the time but doesn't in safe mode

[teapea]

Okay the last 24 hours I have been having major problems with my July 2009 13" MBP (4gb ram / 500gb hdd)
It's been barely usable just getting the spinning beach ball of death for a min or so then it will work again for a few mins then dies again, it won't even open most applications, I thought it was a hardware problem to tried taking out each RAM stick, didn't work, really starting to tear my hair out thought maybe it was a HDD problem. as it took an age just to even boot.

Then today I booted into safe mode and all is well, it's running as normal in safe mode... So I'm thinking it's maybe a software problem, but I have no software login items as I took everything off already.
So it must be something that runs in normal mode but not safe mode that's doing it,
Is there anyway I can find out what it is?
I was thinking of formatting then restoring from my time machine backup but I'm guessing that will restore all the applications too? Plus it's a major faff reinstalling all my software than plugins for software etc,
Was wondering if anyone had any idea,
Thanks,
Tom

 

[mbpcron]

I guess you've tried the usual suspects

Resetting permissions, resetting pram and nvram. Removing third party apps. Running diagnostics on your harddrive, etc?

 

[Hal Itosis]

Then today I booted into safe mode and all is well, it's running as normal in safe mode... So I'm thinking it's maybe a software problem, but I have no software login items as I took everything off already.

Have you tried booting back normally since doing that Safe boot? There's a chance —if the problem was a dirty cache file (font database or something) —that the Safe boot may have removed it. I.e., when you boot normally, a clean cache will be created.

So it must be something that runs in normal mode but not safe mode that's doing it,
Is there anyway I can find out what it is?

Well, you can just look in System Prefs for 3rd-party stuff. There are also Terminal commands that can list 3rd-party extensions or prefPanes...

kextstat |grep -v com.apple


system_profiler SPPrefPaneDataType |
grep -A2 -B3 3rd |sed '/3rd/d;/./!d'

 

[teapea]

Got it, it was "little snitch" once I uninstalled that everything was well in the world again,
Thanks for the replies guys

 

[Hal Itosis]

Got it, it was "little snitch" once I uninstalled that everything was well in the world again,

That's strange... i've been using Little Snitch since day one, and it's never caused any issue.

Are you using LS version 2.2.2 with OSX 10.5.8 or how?