More on the odd Mac behavior

So the problem occurred again. When I went down to look at the machine this morning, I saw the following things:

• Backup open with the “I’m about to back something up” dialog visible and the auto-start count at 0 (i.e. ready to go), but not running
• Backup, Adium and iChat all flagged as “Not Responding” in the Force Quit dialog

When I’m in this state, if I force quite all three apps, then attempt to shutdown, the Mac shuts down to the “grey screen with progress spinner” stage, then stays there forever. I actually have to power it off and on to continue.

The thing is, there are several possible sources of the problem:

1. the 10.4.3 upgrade
2. switching to use the UA-5 USB sound module
3. Backup itself
4. network issues related to backing up to my slug.

It seems like there must be *something* network related, since all 3 apps would have been using the net stack at the point the backup was going to happen. However, even though those apps have locked up, everything seems fine if I browse the web or crawl around on the remote backup volume.

I got the combo 10.4.3 update, and I’m going to re-apply that tonight. I’ve also got the latest version of Disk Warrior and I’m going to feed it the main volume as well. Then it’s flush all the caches and maybe the preferences files and then just hope. If it happens again after that, I’ll have to start disconnecting pieces (likely the UA-5 first) and see if that helps.

sigh.