10.5.2 freezes on a MacBook Pro

Question

Ever since I installed 10.5 on my MacBook Pro I have experienced system freezes 5 to 10 times per day. The freeze does not seem to be associated with any one particular application and the only way to "defrost" is to hold down the power button and restart.
Installing all of the current software updates has not helped and I've used several antivirus programs with no success. A friend of mine at work has a similar problem with his iMac.
Any suggestions? Thanks!

Answer 1

THe kern is a bad font and actually in this case is not the problem (i'd disable it though anyway). The problem is with your 35 duplicates.
The problem seems to be that Leopard ships with new versions of open type fonts and then apps such as MS Office install older versions. The conflict between the two is what's causing the issue.
To solve the problem you have to physically move (not disable) the older duplicates from their source folders.
Fonts are stored in three or more locations:
the /system/library/fonts folder (this is a critical folder, touch nothing).
the /library/fonts folder where the majority of your leopard installed fonts will be in
and user/library/fonts where you've have installed fonts for your own use only.
Other apps like those from Adobe and Microsoft then create their own font caches to improve application performance.
When an application looks for a fonts it starts:
1) in its own cache
2) then your user folder
3) then the library folder
4) and finally the system folder.
The problem arises because leopard has installed nice new shiny complete open type format fonts into your library folder. Office or other apps then install older slightly rusty fonts into the same folder or one higher up the ranking. Leopard expects the nice new shiny font but grabs the old rusty one first (as its in a higher priority look up folder) your RAM gets upset and there's a huge row resulting in the hang crash refusal to quit and the subsequent restart.
So what you should do:
You've identified your 35 duplicates in font book. Keep that list open to act as your reference.
You want to remove the older duplicate versions and maintain the new leopard opentype versions.
View each folder in list view so that you can see the size, kind and modification dates noting that:
The Apple supplied fonts are
a) larger in size,
b) have a newer creation date and
c) have a .ttf extension, the fonts installed by Office 2004 do not.
Your main offenders will be common fonts such as
Arial
Arial Black
Comic Sans MS
Tahoma
Trebuchet MS
Verdana
Webdings
Create a folder on your desktop and call it say 'removed fonts'
Start in the MSOffice folder (of you have one) and drag the older duplicate fonts from there into your desktop 'removed fonts' folder
Then go through you user/library fonts folder and do the same
Finish in your library/fonts folder.
Do not delete the fonts simply move them to the separate folder on your desktop.
(You can reinstall them later from there if needs be).
Even though the fonts are in separate font folders their very presence is causing the conflict.
Now go back to font book, select all fonts and run the validation on them again.
You may need to activate some fonts that were inadvertently switched off by font book.
Repeat until all duplicates are fixed and all fonts are activated and valid.
If you have office you may want to remove the office preferences files and the Microsoft folder from your user/library/preferences folder (don;t delete just drag into a separate folder.
Restart your Mac
Hope this helps and please post back with your results.
M.