After Leopard upgrade, computer starts up fine but gets stuck at finder

Question

I've upgraded from Tiger to Leopard. Everything went smoothly in the install. When the computer first rebooted and finder appeared, everything worked great. Then I opened my email and it asked for the keychain to be 'reset'. I clicked reset and then waited. After about 30 minutes, the 'rainbow wheel' was still spinning and everything appeared to be frozen. I couldn't even opt-command-esc, so I pressed the reset button on the G5 tower. Then I booted from the OSX disc and checked the hard drives with the utilities program. Nothing wrong apparently. I then reinstalled the OSX 10.5 again figuring that might help. When it restarted, the system got stuck after all the apps & finder loaded with the spinning rainbow wheel again. This time the hard drives or any other files did not show up on the desktop, and its been spinning for a long time now. I can also hear the hard drives working quite hard in the tower.
A bit of background info: before I upgraded, my old Tiger had a problem with the keychain access and wouldn't save any of my passwords and wouldn't reset properly. I had also ran a disk verify on it and found a few errors which I had actually forgotten to fix in the older system. Would this be the root of the problem? What should I do now? Will I need to do an archive and install? I really can't lose my user settings, email, address book, etc. Is there a way to save these and back them up? If so, how and where are the files located? I have two hard drives in my tower and several back-up firewire & USB drives if needed.
Thanks,
Clayton.

Answer 1

Before you go the route of another install, try a couple of basic maintenance steps.
First reset PRAM. Hold the 4 keys Apple-Option-P-R while rebooting until you hear the SECOND startup chime.
When you get to the log in window, don't log in. Just Shut Down the computer.
Now do a Safe Mode boot. Hold the "shift" key while booting until you get the spinning gear on the gray Apple screen. Be patient, this will take a while. Eventually you will get to a log in window with a notation that you are booted in Safe Mode. Again, just Shut Down the computer.
Now try to boot up normally and see if things are working better for you.
PRAM holds copies of certain system settings for rapid access and if it gets out of whack all sorts of strange things can happen. A Safe Mode boot does various maintenance steps in the background as it boots up.
If your account keychain is screwed up, you may be able to fix it by doing a First Aid from the Applications / Utilities / Keychain Access application.
Alternatively, you can boot directly from the Leopard install DVD (hold the "c" key while booting) and then use the utilities in the menu bar to enable the "root" account and give it a password. The details are here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306876
After logging in as "root" you can use System Preferences / Accounts to create a new user account. If logging in to that account seems to be working properly then the problem is limited to your original account. You could diagnose that further or your could copy your personal stuff to the new account, set preferences the way you like them, and, eventually just delete the faulty account.
EDITED TO ADD: Ah! I see you found a more direct solution. Good.
--Bob
Message was edited by: BobP1776