after a week of tearing my lovely red dredds out in frustration, i think i've finally got to the bottom of my insane problem which in short saw:
1. apps not launching [esp. macromedia flashMX 2004, macromedia dreamweaverMX 2004 and adobe golive 6]
2. adobe indesignCS crashing on opening previously saved docs.
3. various apps [usually installer vise] licence agreement panels being blank.
for more background on all of this read
this thread and
this thread.
thanx to wadesworld [and others] for pointing me in the right direction.
it seems that all of my problems were being caused by some kind of font corruption. i've tried various font apps to try and check out my setup and none of them were much use besides vaguely hinting that something was wrong with my system fonts. loathe to do yet another format and clean install, i thought i'd give
pacifist a go. using pacifist, i re-installed all my '/library/fonts/<fonts>' and /system/library/fonts/<fonts>' from my panther CDs and rebooted and... everything seems back to normal: dreamweaver and flash are launching and running and indesign is opening files again, without dying.
and, thank f**k! i managed to sort it this time without having to resort to yet another feckin clean install, so kudos also to CharlesS for pacifist.
BTW - the problem i had happened 3 times [on each occasion with a clean install of panther]. twice after cinema4D had frozen the system and once after a kernel panic. so if you have a bad crash and then suffer any of the symptoms i outlined above, you may want to investigate the possibility that font corruption is responsible.
the weird thing is that the problem only affected the user account that was active when the crash/kernel panic happened. logically since it was a system level font problem [i have no user fonts installed yet], then all users should have suffered the same problem, but all other accounts on the comp continued to function normally. completely illogical - but that's wot happened!
hope this info saves someone elses sanity!
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