ATSServer fatal exception- runaway syslogd process & massive asl.log file

Question

Hi All,
(in lieu of a bug report)
My MacBook has recently started to go unresponsive (beachball of death), with only cursor movement and the clock indicating it wasn't frozen (Cmd-Opt-Esc didn't work either), forcing me to hard restart. When this happens Activity Monitor shows syslogd hogging all the CPU, and inactive memory climbs until it maxes out after which the fans kick in and soon after the computer goes unresponsive. I checked Console and found a 1GB+ asl.log file (which has now mutated into a new file for each instance), with pages of this message (all same time stamp, 3 examples listed):
[Time 2007.11.16 03:39:43 UTC] [Facility user] [Sender /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Frameworks/ATS.framewo rk/Support/ATSServer] [PID -1] [Message FOExceptionMainHandler caught a fatal exception at 0x00018d03;] [Level 3] [UID -2] [GID -2] [Host oli-studholmes-computer]
[Time 2007.11.16 03:26:10 UTC] [Facility user] [Sender /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Frameworks/ATS.framewo rk/Support/ATSServer] [PID -1] [Message FOExceptionMainHandler caught a fatal exception at 0x00018d03;] [Level 3] [UID -2] [GID -2] [Host oli-studholmes-computer]
[Time 2007.11.20 07:19:21 UTC] [Facility user] [Sender /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Frameworks/ATS.framewo rk/Support/ATSServer] [PID -1] [Message FOExceptionMainHandler caught a fatal exception at 0x00018d03;] [Level 3] [UID -2] [GID -2] [Host oli-studholmes-computer]
My only workaround is to force-kill the syslogd process. Since this happened I've updated from Mac OS X 10.4.10 to 10.4.11, but the problem hasn't stopped. I haven't recently installed any other software.
I first noticed this trying to open a file containing Japanese text in TextMate, which led me to this page:
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/hetima/20061102/1162435711#c1184639718
(basically others having the same problem, using the same workaround, and the last comment saying it also happens in other text editors and looks like a system bug).
At this time I did a Disk Utility repair which found errors and repaired them (although I had to do the repair via Target Disk Mode as I couldn't boot from the Tiger install DVD and even the verify process would fail due to an underlying process (i think it was diskutil-can't remember) hanging). Also because there was the suggestion of a font problem I checked my fonts with Font Book (all ok), and cleared font caches with Font Finangler (this was all pre-10.4.11 update).
I'm going to go to the Apple store once I back everything up. I'd be interested if anyone else has seen this, and if so if it was related to Japanese fonts or not.
peace
PS how do I prevent Jive from turning all those nice square brackets into links I wonder? the pretag in square brackets doesn't do it, and [code] isn't enabled...
PPS this link to a [Mac OS X 10.3 ATS Services bug report|http://daringfireball.net/2005/03/fontcaches_gonewild] might also be relevant
Message was edited by: Oli Studholme (adding PSs
Message was edited by: Oli Studholme

Answer 1

I have a problem with safari just quitting on me. the safari window will close. a new window comes up saying safari quit unexpectedly and ask if it want to report it. I repaired permissions, a few things came up. Ran the repair. It seems to have cleared up the problem.
Thankyou very much.