I had to reinstall Panther on my computer because the Tiger disk that I recently updated the OS on this Mac with had some bad patches in it that lead to a screwy install.

Your tips were invaluable to helping me finally figure this out.

Now I’ve got a complaint request into the company that sold me the disk, and hopefully it will be resolved soon.

The applications shutting down, like Michael describes, is evidence that the system is protecting itself.

However; it is obvious that I cannot guarantee this to be the issue. It was merely a suggestion as I do not have the machine in front of me and have little else to go on.

Out of curiosity, how much available drive space is on your start-up drive?

I wish you luck Michael and it was good that you backed up before doing a fresh install. I hope to read the results here in the end.

I feel that either Ron is attempting to deliberately mis-inform you (shame on you, Ron!), or he is not a Mac user (perhaps doesn’t even use computers). If Ron has made a genuine mistake, I apologise for being accusative

Best advice: visit an Apple store, or telephone them. The numbers will be in the packaging your Mac Mini arrived in, or available on the Internet at Apple.com or Apple.com/uk (if you’re in the UK).

Best of luck
Rich

thoughts?

i really don’t think this will be the issue. Afterall, even if you did have your harddrive full, resulting in a small about of VM, this should not cause applications to simply close; they would instead just run very slowly. The OS would cope with the lack of memory by closing non-essential threads in the applications, saving memory. And hey, he never said it happened ‘when he had loads of app’s already open’.

I would phone apple.

I would also run Onyx on your system so you could get a full maintenance just to see if that helps or not.

Anyhow, either way, if it were my machine, I would try the following [since most of these are fairly easy if you have the stuff to do them with]

boot into open firmware cmd+opt+o+f and type the reset-nvram and then reset-all and see if that gets you anywhere [it probably will do nothing, but worth a shot]

Run Apple Hardware Test CD – both short and long tests. If something doesn’t test right, fix it or get it fixed [could be bad memory or something simple]. If you have CD’s that came with the machine, it’s one of the CD’s. Otherwise, I believe it’s on the Disk 1 DVD and you hold the option key down and then select it [or read what it says on the front of the disk].

[at this point, you could download the latest combo updates and run them if you like, but i tend to move towards the guaranteed solutions - risk / time management. Sometimes, what you have available depends on which route you take]

If that checks out fine, I would use Disk Utility to restore the contents of the Drive to another Drive / Partition. Then Boot off that drive / partition. If everything works fine, Wipe the interal partition and then Restore the contents back.

If that does not work, Wipe the drive [you now have a back up] and re-install the OS and Applications, run the updates, and move your files back over [you can move the files over during the set up process, but i tend to move them over by hand - always have stuff i want to get rid of].

my bet is that thru theses steps, you will have solved the problem, even if you never know what the problem is. If you have several external drives / partitions you can use, you can change the order and play around a little bit more if you like to tinker.

Good luck, and I’ll try to remember to check back incase you are still having problems and what you did that finally fixed the problem for you.

Yes, I did.

@matt

thanks…I’ll give deleting the prefs a shot.

i.e. com.apple.iDVD.plist

Put the corresponding files to the trash, restart, and try again opening said apps.
regards
matt