How I cured Aperture 1.5 of Kernal Panics and put a smile on my face.

Question

When I first installed Aperture 1.5 everything was fine - for awhile. Then after about 30 minutes I got a KP. I'd reboot and restart Aperture and in a few minutes - KP again. This would happen over and over. Now, a minute or two after I started Aperture, the system would KP - without fail.
People here kept pointing at RAM and hardware. Of course, I'd never had a problem before 1.5 and the KP was very reproducible - all I needed to do was start Aperture and wait a minute or two and KP, again. NOT RAM NOT HARDWARE!!
OK, now what to do? I finally figured out that Aperture was running a background task to build previews. A minute or two after I started Aperture, this task would start and - KP, again. This stopped me from getting to Aperture to fix any problems. But I found that if I started Aperture and as soon as possible clicked Window > Show Task List and then canceled the Preview build, Aperture would run fine. Now we're making progress!
I concluded that Aperture was trying to build a preview of a corrupted file and that was causing the KP. As soon as I started Aperture, it would resume building previews in the background where it left off at the last KP and when it got to that file, KP again.
Once I had Aperture running and the Preview building task shut down, I went through and right clicked on each project and deleted the previews on each. Then I right clicked on each project, one at a time, and selected Rebuild Previews from the menu. I went through each Project this way until I hit the one with the corrupted file. It was easy to spot because when it hit that file - KP, again. Now I knew what Project the suspect file was in. I was lucky. I hadn't done much with those 3,000 files in the offending Project, so I deleted the Project and re-imported the photos. Sure enough, during the import, Aperture refused to import one of them - but did not KP. It worked fine.
Now I can start and run Aperture without problem. Obviously, contrary to what some folks say, Aperture CAN and WILL cause a KP under the right conditions.
Maybe my "shotgun" approach was excessive but it worked. Anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking to it!
denny
G5 Quad w/7800, 4.0 GB ram, 4 TB raid, 30" Cine, MacBookPro 17" G5 dual 2.0 g   Mac OS X (10.4.8)   And a partridge in a pear tree!

Answer 1

Eric,
Not necessarily to find the corrupted file but to shut off the building of previews. The "gear" in the upper right of the projects panel can turn off preview building for a particular project and the preferences can stop preview building for new projects. I'd probably use those to help narrow it down. But now I have previews tuened off completely as I don't need them. I can always turn them back on later.
If you find a corrupted file, try opening it in Photoshop and saving it as a tiff. I found that this sometimes works and the tiff can be imported into Apertures with no problem.