I just spent a wondrous 4 hours in update purgatory using every trick in the
book to get past the default screen that follows your login.
Earlier today I installed the 2005-009 security Update and rebooted without incident.
This evening I tried to open a Stuffit compressed file that apparently
became corrupted when I lost my signal earlier in the day.
Stuffit tried to open it without success, then refused to quit or force quit
after several attempts.
I had better things to do, so I shut down the hard way.
Upon rebooting, I could't get past my login.
It took my password fine, but then just stalled.
I waited and waited and finally went for another hard shut down.
I'm pretty sure Stuffit was trying to archive the failed attempt to
expand the corrupted file I had downloaded, but it just wouldn't quit.
It get's better.
I'm fortunate to have a 2nd defaut boot drive in my tower, so I used my OS disc to repair permissions on my primary drive then booted up to the 2nd drive so I could run Disk Warrior.
I had also installed the security update on this default boot drive.
After verifying permissions and verifying the discs,
I decided to see what the volume looked like and saw that it was about
3% out, so I ran the defragging utility and all looked fine until during
step 8 I got that dreadful "YOU MUST SHUT DOWN YOUR COMPUTER"
error that indicates a kernel panic.
GraphicUmp, bless her heart, stayed with me for the next hour or so
trying to help me get the system back up, but I kept getting back to the
login and no further.
I deleted the cache files indicated in MacFixit's article, but no joy.
Finally, I ran the OS disc and decided to try changing the password
and whaddya know it worked. I got past the login window and that was where it stayed.
It was still chugging away 15 minutes later so I shut it down again.
We tried the single user boot, reset PMU and NVRAM and nothing seemed to work. Graphic ump signed off convinced that I'd have to run an archive install.
I tried to run Tiger Cache Cleaner off the secondary drive, but that didn't work because you have to run it from your boot drive.
Anyway, I finally went back and repaired the promary drive again off the OS disc, then ran DiskWarrior 2 more times until the primary drive show
100% and saved.
I decided that i would change the password back to my normal password
and FINALLY I was able to login and got back to my desktop.
When I finally got back into my home folder, there were 7 alias user
folders in the home folder.
As far as I can tell, I may have been fine if I had not run out of patience
and given the volume more time to index after I logged in, but it appeared to be frozen so I gave up.
As result of my folley, I had to run Tiger Cache Cleaner, repair permissons
again and relaunch all my normal dock applications.
By some miracle, I'm back up with nothing more than a headache.
I still don't know if it was the OS security update, Stuffit, FileVault or my
old McAfee 7.2 that caused the problem. Or simply my own pilot error for losing patience.
I still have no idea what caused the kernel panic on my secondary default drive.