[X4U] Major Tiger problem, login has spinning beachball > 5 hours

[John Daschbach]

I am having some major troubles with Tiger which I would only expect  
in alpha or beta software.  I upgraded 3 machines, two from 10.2 and  
one from 10.3.   The first time I logged back into my G3 iMac (768MB)  
I got to the start of drawing the menubar on the desktop and the  
spinning beachball of death came on for about 5 minutes.  After  
upgrading iTunes I rebooted and at the same point in the login the  
beachball started.  The system is unresponsive.  The Spotlight entry  
is in the menubar on the right hand side, the rest of the menubar is  
not drawn.  After 5 hours I ssh'd over and shutdown the system (/sbin/ 
shutdown).  Upon rebooting I logged into my wife's acount.  The  
beachball was present for a minute or so and then the desktop was  
populated.  I then did a fast user switch to my account.  The same  
result as before, beachball of death.  The CPU hog is ATSServer,  
which restarts as soon as it is killed.  I found some info on the net  
claiming font caches were the problem with ATSServer hogging the cpu  
to the exclusion of everything else in 10.3.  I rebooted, ssh'd over  
and deleted the recomended caches, then tried to login from the  
console.  Same spinning beachball of death.

So now I have an unusable Mac, thanks to Tiger.  It must be some  
cache in my file tree, but I have rm'd all the font and ATS caches I  
have found.  This system has worked on 10.2 since it was released.  I  
really consider it unacceptable that a system process like ATSServer  
has no internal checks.  One would think that a process which can  
halt the login might check to see if it had been running for say 50  
or 100 seconds and then proceed and advise the user how to fix the  
process (which the system should do for itself).

I'm open to ideas on what to remove so I can login.

-John