It's like my computer is possessed

Question

Today has been a day of whirling beachballs!!!
I've done two things in the last two days that might have some bearing on my current problems. First, I added four Maxtor OneTouch 4Plus External Hard drives. Some program on the Maxtor keeps trying to sync the drives. I've thrown away every Maxtor ap I can find and it still pops up on restart and I've had to restart a ton of times today!!
The other thing I did is run software update yesterday. I think it included QuickTime 7.4.1, Safari 3.1 and a security update.
Anyway, now my OS is possessed. The problems I've had today are almost too numerous to mention! Early yesterday I tried downloading the MacBook Air tour video. 184Mb. It downloaded fine but got about 90% of the way through unzipping the file and locked up. Then Safari, the Finder and iTunes followed. Nothing would force quit either. I finally just held down the power button. A little later, while trying to work on my website Safari quit again and again it seems like half my other programs followed. After being forced to do the power button hard shutdown again I restarted. After working again for a short while the Spotlight and Find functions both quit. I couldn't search anything. Photoshop started taking seven or eight minutes to save a file!! After restarting again, all the apps, folders and stationary pads I keep in my finder window all disappeared. Later Final Cut Pro locked up (actually FCP's locked up four or five times now). I tried to force quit and the force quit didn't work. It wouldn't even come up on the screen. I'm having every restart contested by the mirror agent. I can't get my .Mac account to stop syncing and, with all the crashes I've had, there's not much for it to sync! Still, it's running constantly and won't respond to a "Cancel Sync" command.
It's like every program on my computer has gone nuts! I tried repairing permissions and the Disk Utility froze up. I've ditched my preferences on some of the programs but nothing seems to help. Everything I touch turns to mud!
Any ideas what I can try?
TIA,
Peter
Message was edited by: petemay

Answer 1

petemay, when I just now saw the subject line for your post, I thought you must be suffering from the same problem as me, because I too feel like my computer is possessed! And sure enough, I learn that you also just ran Software Update and installed the most recent Security Update along with other files.
See this thread of mine:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1459413&tstart=0
I too have a Seagate drive (with 4 partitions/volumes) in an external firewire enclosure, but I don't think that's part of the problem in my case (I often have it shut off, and the problem persists whether it's on or off). I am now convinced (after reading various Security Update-related posts here) that the source of the problem is the 2008-002 Security Update.
I have been getting endlessly spinning ballz whenever I attempt to save or download a file (even a tiny jpg or text-only web page). Force Quit eventually works after quarter-hours and half-hours --kinda-- but it's barely worth the pain of waiting for it to do so. The Force Quit dialog box regularly shows 3, 4, or 5 apps (usually including the Finder) "not responding."
What will it take to get Apple to fix whatever's been messed up by that **** Security Update? So far, none of these hangs has brought up the crash report dialog box, and anyway I understand that those crash reports are not read. How do we bring this to their attention?