I encountered a weird Mac OS X problem yesterday I hadn't seen before. Let me explain the details:
I normally have my iMac at home on a network with a Linux PC, a Win2k PC and an old Win98 PC. I can browser all workgroups and computers and access files from my Mac like I should.
But I recently moved my Mac to the home of some friends, since I'm self-employed and can work from anywhere. It's a mixed wired/wireless network with a few other Win2k PCs. I can see the other computers on the LAN but can't connect or browse shared directories; I assume that the router might be improperly set up, but anyway, that's not the problem.
The problem is yesterday I connected to my Mac from a PC to transfer some files. Afterwards, I noticed that my CPU was being used 100%, even though none of the processes listed were using more than 5%. Restarting didn't fix the problem, but when I noticed that there was too much network activity going on, I turned off Windows file sharing, and CPU usage immediately dropped to normal (nearly zero).
I'm guessing that both the Windows PC and OS X share responsibility, and the network connection from the PC made my Mac go haywire. I suppose the problem will start up again next time I try transferring a file. Has anyone heard of this problem before, and are there any remedies?
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