Disk Utility crashing, mounting encrypted drives w/out passwd

Question

MacBook Pro
15-inch, Mid 2012
Processor  2.6 GHz Intel Core i7
Memory  8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Graphics  NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1024 MB
Boot drive: OCZ-VERTEX4 256GB SSD
Data drive: APPLE HDD HTS547575A9E384 (original 750GB spindle moved to Optical bay)
OSX 10.8.5 with all OS level updates installed
Disk Utilty has become progressively worse, crashing randomly when mounting drives. Sometimes it works. Sometimes not. Does not matter if the computer is freshly booted or running for some time. Both with and without external drives. Tried zapping the PRAM. No difference.
What's more, my Data drive (the HDD listed above) is encrypted and should NOT auto-mount. I have NEVER selected the auto-mount check-box. And yet, there are times (not always) that I enter the passwd for the one-time (until next reboot) Unlocking of the drive and the correct passwd yields the "Incorrect Password" error over and over again. I quit Disk Utility and wha-lah! --the drive is mounted.
It got to the point that Disk Utility was auto-mounting the encrypted HDD drive without my ever selecting the auto-mount check-box. I deleted all Keychain preferences and this re-set Disk Utility back to its normal behaviour.  The preferences / Keychain file must have corrupted with all the Disk Utility crashes.
What is going on? How can one of the oldest apps in OSX behave like this?
Ideas?!
kai

Answer 1

Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
Step 1
Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar.
Enter the name of the crashed application or process in the Filter text field. Select the messages from the time of the last crash, if any. Copy them to the Clipboard (command-C). Paste into a reply to this message (command-V).
When posting a log extract, be selective. In most cases, a few dozen lines are more than enough.
Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Important: Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.
Step 2
In the Console window, look under User Diagnostic Reports for crash reports related to the crashed process. The report name starts with the name of the process, and ends with ".crash". Select the most recent report and post the entire contents — again, the text, not a screenshot. In the interest of privacy, I suggest that, before posting, you edit out the “Anonymous UUID,” a long string of letters, numbers, and dashes in the header of the report, if it’s present (it may not be.) Please don’t post shutdownStall, spin, or hang logs — they're very long and not helpful.