Choppy iPhone video playback after upgrading to 10.5 + QuickTime 7.6.9

Question

Hi,
I recently upgraded from 10.4 to 10.5 on my Powerbook G4. I used the "Archive and Install" option. After updating all software to the latest (10.5.8 OSX + 7.6.9 QuickTime), I noticed that the playback of the videos shot with my iPhone 3GS becomes extremely choppy (jumps combined with slow-mo). Based on the what's in "Previous System", I was using QT 7.6.4 with OS 10.4, which didn't have this playback issue.
I found several posts related to similar issues in the forum, and tried the following suggestions without success:
(1) removing all third party plug-ins from /Library/QuickTime;
(2) repair permissions with Disk Utility;
(3) installing Perian;
None of the above made a difference. Just for the heck of it, I tried "su" in Terminal and moved "QuickTimeH264.component" to "QuickTimeH264.component.bkp". Surprisingly this made the playback a lot better (all the iPhone clips are H264+ACC). So I'm guessing somehow the QT H264 component is not working properly for me, but what is QT using instead to play those videos after I renamed the component? It shouldn't be any of the third-party plug-ins since I tried removing all the third-party stuff at the same time, and the videos still played fine. I'd like to get to the bottom of this as I'm a little uneasy about re-naming the H264 component.
I hope someone more QT savvy can diagnose the problem based on what I've tried and make new suggestions. Granted my machine is a bit long in the tooth but it's still decently powered (1.67 GHz, 1.5 GB RAM, 320GB HDD) and the videos played fine before the "upgrade".
Is it worth doing a clean re-install of 10.5 as opposed to the "archive and install"? It's a pain obviously to have to re-install all the apps but I'm willing to try it if it could reasonably make a difference.
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The problem is that you moved your Mail application to a sub-folder in your Applications folder, and you are running an older copy of Mail.
From your crash report it shows your path is to a different folder then the default folder:
Path: /Applications/Mail Apps/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/Mail
It also shows that you are not running the correct version of Mail (should be version 3.5 (930.3):
Version: 3.5 (929.4)
Check out this article:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2486
The short of it is that you may have two copies of Mail on your system. When 10.5.6 installed, it may not have updated Mail correctly. Look to see if you have another copy of Mail in your Applications folder, and if so run it and check it's version from the 'About Mail' menu option, it should be 3.5 (930.0). My recommendation is to remove any copy of mail that is not in /Applications (if there is no version of Mail in Applications, move the one you have in Mail Apps back) and run the Mail Update referenced in the article above.