Strange console.app failure

[William H. Magill]

This is an esoteric problem, so skip reading unless you are interested 
in the greasy bowels of OS X.

Sigh... too many balls in the air (assorted changes) to know exactly 
when this problem started, and hence easily back-out things... (i.e. 
Quite a few updates to things  since mid-January when I last had went 
to use console.app)

The symptoms:

1- console.app launches puts up two blank windows (normal for me). The 
two windows are the console and system log. "Normally" after a period 
of time, typically 2-5 seconds, the two windows populate with the 
contents of their respective log files. Now however, they simply spin 
the beach ball. Trying to quit console.app -- fails... go to the 
dock... "force quit" is showing... it force quits.

2- clear out /system/library/caches /library/caches and 
Extensions.kextcache ... it works again.

3- Similar behavior from System profiler.

4- Similar behavior from Disk Utility -- disks are listed ok. Select a 
disk and the beachball spins.

Nothing obviously wrong with permissions ... (Terminal always works 
fine.)

The only "wierd error" in startup I find, is that ntpdate now fails on 
every reboot. (If you run ntpdate manually, it complains, as expected, 
that the port is in use, but then fails with a bus error. So this one 
can be easily ignored.)
And occasionally:
"mach_init[2]: Server 0 in bootstrap d03 uid 0: "/usr/sbin/lookupd": 
exited as a result of signal 1 [pid 162]"
Then lookupd apparently restarts with no problem. This bothers me, but 
doesn't appear to be a real problem.

I'm currently favoring a USB related problem:

During the course of tracking this down, I also had my Kensington 
wireless trackball suddenly stop working... but a "plain" USB mouse 
plugged into my MacAllay keyboard, and the keyboard work fine.
Also ... my Epson CX5200 prints with no problems... but the scanner 
can't be seen.

Power cycling the world doesn't seem to have any effect. Only clearing 
the ktextcache. So, I assume that the original ktext extension files 
are intact, but once the ktextcache is created the data there is 
corrupt.

???

Any ideas.


T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
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