[Richard Clark]

G3/266 Beige
128 MB RAM
OS 9.0.4

Machine will lock when nothing is going on. Every morning it is locked and has to be restarted. It will also lock through out the day. Norton Utilities was run and found only bundle bits, custom icon problems. The hard drive was defragmented. The problem persisted so all core OS components were re-installed. The machine again locked up this morning.

Programs running on this machine includes Cellview (MacRumba), M.S. Office, Quark X-Press 4.1, and Lotus Notes R5.05. The operating system had a clean install about two weeks ago.

When it crashes it leaves a white programers box that is empty except for a ^.


Any help, tips, tricks or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance for your help!!!

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[AppleScript]

When the programmer's box appears, enter "G" to exit. Entering "G FINDER" will force-quit the current application. Another thing that might work is to enter "SM 0 A9F4" and then "G 0"(those are zeros.)

You might also want to install MacsBug, which can be found here:
ftp://ftp.apple.com/developer/Tool_Chest/Testing_-_Debugging/Debuggers_-_dcmds/MacsBug_6.6.3.sit.hqx

[pathogen]

I'll bet my ascot its a third party extension. Do you have the problem if you boot with only the OS 9 Base extensions? You could go through the non-system extensions one by one, but I think its time to do what you may have been avoiding. Its likely that a disk error corrupted an extension or library thats being loaded into RAM at start-up, and so the finder is crashing.

In cases like this, both a clean install of the OS and fresh installs of all the apps are musts.