I have a powerbook 1.25ghz, 1gig Ram, running OSX.3.5. This is not really a new problem but recently it seems to happen more frequently. It happens quite randomly, but often seems to be when I have just used expose. The symptoms: Suddenly the dock dies and becomes completely unresponsive. If I mouse over it then the beachball comes up. Same thing if I mouse over the menu bar. The machine gets really hot and when I open up a CPU Monitor (I use PTHCPUMonitor) it shows that dock is using up like 80%-90% of CPU cycles. This will just go on, leaving all operation extremely slow. Most of the time I can still open/close apps, even open files. They just happen really really slowly. I found out the only way to snap out of this (other than a forced reboot) is to kill the "windowserver" process. This will brings on the blue screen for a couple of seconds, then basically the finders reboots itself. All previously open apps were forced quit. I also tried to force quit the dock, the finder but they won't make any difference. Only killing windowserver does it everytime. No idea what is bringing this on but I have seen this for awhile now... maybe 4-6 months? Wonder if anyone else has the same problem, or someone smart that knows what windowserver is can tell me what I can do to fix this. Thanks!!
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