[waterbuck]

I had some very long stalls while using Word (2004) and running my OS 10.3.9 (I have not updated to Tiger yet). AFter those stalls, my OS basically crashed, with the principle evidence of major trouble being:
1. The little icons on the top of my screen (battery, ethernet indicator, screen indicator, clock, bluetooth indicator, audio volume indicator, date/time, user) were all GONE
2. System preferences would not open.
3. The machine intermittently recognized external drives and I was able to copy my data both to a networked drive (running Retrospect) and to a Firewire drive (direct copy).
4. Repair Permissions was not available as an option when running Disk Utility, at least once, and the image for the hard drive was greyed out intermittently, as if the drive itself was not mounted.

5. An example of the kind of crash log I obtained (this was from the failure of System Preferences to open) was as follows:

Date/Time: 2005-05-19 11:12:29 -0500
OS Version: 10.3.9 (Build 7W98)
Report Version: 2
Command: System Preferences
Path: /Applications/System Preferences.app/Contents/MacOS/System Preferences
Version: ??? (???)
PID: 482
Thread: Unknown

Link (dyld) error:

dyld: /Applications/System Preferences.app/Contents/MacOS/System Preferences malformed library: /System/Library/Frameworks/PreferencePanes.framework/Versions/A/PreferencePanes (not a Mach-O file, bad magic number)

OUR RESPONSE, REINSTALLING THE OS, WORKED, PARTIALLY-

6. a local store looked this over and told me to Archive and Reinstall OS X.3.7 (then update to 10.3.9) which I did using the Install discs that came with my machine. This basically got everything back and operational. We fixed permissions on the new system, as well.

7. Now I have had at least a few more unexplained stalls. The system has recovered from them, after 20-30 seconds (not even a spinning beachball). They happened in using Word. I can't figure out what happened. I'm worried that this whole thing will happen again. What to do?
Anything else to check?
I can't really tell if this is a hardware or a software issue, anyway.


Thanks

[Detrius]

Take a look at what I wrote up here: http://forums.macnn.com/90/mac-os-x/248286/the-thread-computer-freezes-panics-crashes/

While your issue doesn't fit perfectly into any of my described issues, I'm leaning towards a failing hard drive. Just in case this is true, you should make sure you have all of your important data backed up first. Then, check out the last paragraph of the fifth post down--about surface scans.

You may want to keep an eye on Apple's Activity Monitor to see what kind of disk activity you are getting. You should be weary of consistent transfer rates less than 2MB/sec, as this is also indicative of a bad hard drive.

[OreoCookie]

I second the drive theory. Happened to me recently.