10.3.3 Upgrade slowdown and keyboard problems

[Jon Warms]

My iBook (original tangerine clamshell) had been running Jaguar 
(10.2.8) very acceptably, primarily for Mail, AOL, and various 
browsers. I installed 10.3 without any significant degradation. But the 
10.3.3 upgrade has been a disaster. While the installation went ok, 
everything is super slow.

Starting up takes 25 minutes before it's finished! Most finder actions 
invoke the spinning rainbow. Although they're unusable, apps still run 
'normally' but very slowly.

This acts like a memory problem, and prolly is, but there conceivably 
could be some other reason. It has a 256 MB memory card for a total of 
288 MB, so I can't run the system without the memory card; however the 
memory hasn't failed any of the startup tests.

Now the keyboard doesn't work in OS X but does with an OS9 boot.

If I start in OS9, everything works normally, including the keyboard. 
This adds to my perplexion because the keyboard was working until I 
opened the machine to re-insert the memory (which didn't change 
anything), so I could understand it if I had disrupted the keyboard 
cable and that had caused a HARD failure.

The trackpad hasn't been working for two years so that prolly isn't the 
problem.

So my dilemma is:

1) Is it the memory board? I don't have a known-good board big enough 
to swap.

2) Or is it a Unix/OS X problem? Is it always looking for something, 
like the internal keyboard and trackpad, that isn't there? (I have an 
Apple keyboard and Apple mouse plugged into the USB port.)

3) Or is it something else? Following the KB article (which I can't 
find now) I checked for the slow startup problem from 10.3.2 (which 
strangely started ok for me),  and got the "no file" message.


All this was repeatable. I repartitioned, installed 9.2.1 in the 
smaller partition (6 GB), and Panther and its upgrades in the larger 
partition (13 GB), with the results described above.

Jon