OK, the solution to this may be obvious to all you experts out there, but I experienced WIERD behavior after installing Panther and I have to tell you about it and how I solved it.
It all started with an upgrade install on my MDD dual gigahertz over Jag 10.2.6. I installed on my 36Gb SCSI drive and all went well for a while. Then Safari wouldn't launch. It would just bounce in the dock a couple of times then stay there. I had to force quit. Then system utilites went unresponsive! Disk Utility (couldn't even repair permissions!), activity monitor, sharing, security, even the accounts tab were dead.
I ran into an Apple rep at CompUSA and in the end he suggested doing a clean install on my other drive, a Western Digital 120Gb ATA w/8Mb buffer. I did so and all looked good until this morning when I decided to enable the screen saver password lock for security reasons.
I activated the screen saver, then when I moved the mouse to test my password the screensaver would hesitate but no password box would appear! I tried typing in the password repeatedly, but the screen saver would keep starting up again. I was screwed!
I left it all day, got home from work and had to do a hard restart. I fiddled around with it and was seriously contemplating a clean reinstall when I found the problem.
Fonts. In FontBook I had disabled a duplicate of Arial. That font, apparently, was being used by the system. I enabled that font and everything works now. So once again, just like way back in OS 6.0, fonts can screw you up! I did a clean install for no good reason...
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