Jaguar - many apps fail to start - unexpected quit

[Steve O'Neill]

Help!  I sure hope someone has some idea where to turn next.

For a LOT of applications, when I try to start them, I get an unexpected quit 
error before they even get started.  The most of any app I see is Appleworks, 
which shows its menu and a hollow toolbar, then quits.  Other apps, like iTunes, 
iCal (i.e., apple), Digital Performer 4, Microsoft mouse system preferences 
(third party), just quit before showing anything except maybe a splash screen. 
The system profiler shows they always quit with a EXC_BAD_ACCESS, 
KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS, in a routine called __CFFromUTF8 which is called from 
__CFStringDecodeByteStream3.  At this point the stack traces differ.

This machine was shipped with OS9.2.2 and OSX 10.1.2; I just recently upgraded 
to Jaguar 10.2.2, then 10.2.5.  It was beautiful!  Everything worked.

Then I noticed that my old install of DAVE 3.x (to talk to windoze machines) 
wasn't removed by the installation (although it had appeared to be), so I ran 
its uninstall.  I can't pin it down to this, but I still sometimes get "DAVE 
sharing canceled quit" on a shutdown attempt (no big, just shutdown again) but 
this is AFTER running its uninstaller.  I only mention this because it's an 
anomaly; and suggests I might be in DLL hell a la windoze.

I can run a few programs (Peak 3.21 and Netscape for example), but basically 
this machine is dead in the water!