Ok, so I was writing a report in pages 08' and a software update was running in the background. It finished and asked me to restart, rather than doing that I just covered that window up and kept working because it was 1am and this report was due at 8am the next day. I'm running 10.4 by the way. The next thing that happens is the finder bar flashes on and off, all the applications I was running crashed, for some reason the formatting window for the pages application flashes on and off even though pages has already crashed. I needed a new computer anyway so I got a new macbook pro. It's been about two weeks and any time I start the powerbook I get the same symptoms I just described. The OS is completely non-functional, I can't open any windows without them crashing, finder included. I've booted in safe mode and I get the same results. I can boot into a guest user account using safe mode but it's a pretty useless action because I don't know what to do once I'm there. If I can fix the computer that would be great, but I really just want to get my photos off of my internal hard drive. I had documents, movies, music, and emails all backed up but that foresight didn't extend to my photos for some reason. User malfunction. Any ideas on where to go from here? Macbook pro is pretty awesome by the way.