For more than two weeks I was having a problem on my MacBook Air. At one point I magically fixed it going in Safe Boot (holding shift between boot sound and Apple logo), but I couldn’t pin-point the problem. Lucky I was again sleepless tonight, and I fixed it!
What was the problem? I created a second account last month to separate work stuff on a FileVaulted home directory, worked great. But at one point my other ‘normal’ account was behaving very weird. Everything kept crashing, and even worse.. look for yourself:
Menu’s are not working, starting applications immediately crash; maybe remote login would have worked, but I didn’t bother trying that really.
Lucky I had my second account, and here comes my tip: Make sure you have at least 1 clean account which has Admin rights which you do not touch unless there is trouble. See it as the root account on UNIX which you shouldn’t use (right).
So, my newly created account worked fine. Looking further I found in the logs the ATSServer was continuously crashing:
Oct 13 00:39:52 air com.apple.
ATSServer[109]: ATSServer(109,0xa0502fa0) malloc:*** error for object 0x843000: incorrect checksum for freed object -object was probably modified after being freed.
I cleaned up the databases using atsutils, checked the fonts and all was apparently OK. However, didn’t fix it. Turned off TimeMachine, no go.. Well, I did most of the stuff I found online. Also the fresh security update for Mac OS 10.5 didn’t help.
In the end, I did something very simple to fix it, but not solve it, which is frustrating:
# sudo su - geert$ mv ~/Library/Cache ~/Library/Cache.bak
The next login was very fast! And it fixed the problems! So, something was corrupted in that cache. I’m sure, if I put it back, it will again give issues.
I’m a Support Engineer, and I would probably do this when I was working for Apple. Mmm… Maybe I’ll do it, and move every directory back that was in the Cache trying to pinpoint it.. But not now! Zzzz…