Intermittent Kernel Panics - maybe related to iTunes? Something else?

Question

I have been experiencing intermittent kernel panics the past few weeks - the ones where the screen goes grey and you get the message in multiple languages telling you that you have to restart your computer. I have been trying to figure out exactly what is causing them and, thus far, have been unable to come up with a definite pattern. It does seem that I am starting to narrow things down a bit.
The panics seem to occur when I have a lot of program running simultaneously. I usually have Eudora and Safari running most of the time, and will often fire up Power Point and Word. Then, I may add Excel, Preview, maybe Acrobat or Acrobat reader - I think you get the picture. However, it SEEMS that the culprit in all of this is that if I have had iTunes running, the kernel panics are more likely to occur. However, iTunes does not have to be running at the time of the panic (although I would guess that it has been in over half of the panics I’ve experienced). It just has to have been run recently. I
I have done a lot of troubleshooting, such as running Apple Hardware Test and other utilities and everything comes up just fine. I have done all the maintenance routines, I am using Apple RAM. I have done a lot of the other voodoo that folks suggest in these cases. I have read these forums and most of the posts relating to kernel panics are not quite what I am experiencing. (I did read about some of the audio issues that folks have been experiencing and I just uninstalled the SRS iWOW plugin from iTunes and will see if that makes a difference.)
One final thing. Recently, when I get a panic, there is no record of it in any logs that I can find. Therefore, I cannot trace what was happening just before my MacBook Pro went down. I did find one log (I forget which one now) that suggested that before the most recent panic this morning the last thing logged was activity by DefaultFolder. However, that may have just been the last thing I did that was actually logged. I had stepped away from my computer and when I came back the kernel panic screen was showing.
I am guessing I may need to do a clean reinstall, but before doing that I thought I’d call upon the collective wisdom of the members of these forums. Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated.
Bob Q.

Answer 1

We had a kernel panic last week - iTunes (v.7) was running at the time, so was Mail, but I was building a photo album in iPhoto when it happened. After reboot (took a LONG time to boot up) We repaired permissions and went on as normal. Previously, we had a hard shut down due to a power outage (don't ask: yes of course we have a UPS, but the outage had lasted all day. when the power finally came back on, i powered up the computer and launched Mail. Then the power failed again (grrr!), and apparently, after being out all day, the battery in the UPS didn't even have enough charge for me to have time to quit Mail and power down.)
Then we began to have spontaneous Sleep syndrome: the computer would just suddenly sleep during activity. After this happened a few times, we reset the PRAM, ran the maintenance scripts using Terminal, but the problem persisted. In fact, once it went beyond sleep and shut itself down.
This week, we went into the System Errors log and found this:
kernel[0]: IOSMUPwrController:: OverTemp notification
kernel[0]: Power Management received emergency overtemp signal. Going to sleep.
kernel[0]: System Sleep
kernel[0]: IOBluetoothHCIController::restartShutdownWL this is a wake from sleep
kernel[0]: System Wake
kernel[0]: Wake event 0020
kernel[0]: USB caused wake event (OHCI)
kernel[0]: FireWire (OHCI) Apple ID 52 built-in: handleSelfIDInt - received quads == 0. issuing bus reset
kernel[0]: UniNEnet::monitorLinkStatus - Link is up at 100 Mbps - Full Duplex
mDNSResponder: Repeated transitions for interface en0 (192.168.2.6); delaying packets by 5 seconds
So at this point, we're thinking that the computer was overheating. We've since cleared some space on the internal HD (we only had about 5% available) and also physical space around the unit. Haven't had the problem in two days now. Never had a second kernel panic either...
But we have heard that possibly the fan might be failing... we're still under AppleCare warranty and are thinking that we should maybe call Apple to open a trouble ticket just in case.
your thoughts?
Message was edited by: kalaluka