I have spent the last four days or so trying different searches here seeing if I can find anyone who's had the same problems, but nothing that sounds exactly the same
A couple days after installing the 10.26 update and the latest safari on my 17" imac, safari started freezing up on me fairly frequently, I read that people were having problems with it, so I quit it and was going to restart and use IE until a new version of safari came out. Well when i rebooted I got to the login in screen fine, but then when I entered my l/p it said "logging in" but never actually loaded the finder. I let it sit for 1/2 an hour just to see.
Well I had to hard reboot and then i tried logging in from a troubleshooting user id I had created when i bought the system, it has never been used, so it is totally clean. Well I login to that and it seems like everything is going fine, the dock shows up, so does the background, but before the menu bar came up i got a beach ball that never ended.... I tried some people's suggestions I read on here, running fsck until it says the volume looks ok, repairing permissions with the osx cd, unplugging all peripherals and every suggestion i could find given for similar sounding problems on the forums here.
After doing all that I tried booting into my clean user again, now the finder finished loading but as soon as I tried to get into system preferences or launch an application i would get a never-ending beach ball. Also if i just let the system sit for a few minutes without doing anything a beach ball shows up.
I decided I would use fw target mode and backup my data, i couldn't get my ibook to recognize the imac at first. I had to try it a couple times before i could mount it. Now I've tried a couple more times and mounts every time perfectly. I backed up the essentials.
I have no idea what's going on. I switched from windoze about a year ago, this is the first major mac problem I've had. On my pc i would have to reformat and reinstall the os every 3-4 months. I'm hoping there's a way around this without having to resort to that.
I took a look at the crash logs, there's nothing since all this mess started... last crash that was logged was back in april.
Anybody have any suggestions? I'm very confused by the inconsistency of things. Seems like i try to do something once and it doesn't work, but i try it a couple more times and it works fine (firewire target disk, finder loading with clean user) makes troubleshooting things kind of difficult i think. Only thing consistent is that i can't successfully login to any of my regular user id's or do anything on my clean troubleshooting one.
I'm going to be out of town for nearly a week starting this afternoon, I will have net access but won't be near my imac to try any suggestions, please don't let that discourage you from replying though. Thanks in advance for your help. If you need any additional info just let me know.
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