Java playing havoc with permissions in Snow Leopard

Question

My wife has a 24" iMac, 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo running Snow Leopard 10.6.8 with 4GB RAM. She likes to play games offered on Facebook. Her favorite browser is Firefox. But, playing these Facebook games plays havoc with the permissions on her machine. The machine slows way down and the mouse does not respond well. Using Onyx I repair the permissions, which takes about 5 minutes. Most of the repairs are being made to System/Library/Java and System/Library/CoreServices and other files within the System folder, especially those with a .jar extension. The list of repairs is exceptionally long. Then I fix the permissions using Disk Utility. Again, the same type of permissions are being fixed, the list is very long and it takes about 5 minutes. The iMac runs fine after fixing the permissions -- until the next time she logs on and plays a game. I have disabled Java on both Firefox and Safari; that doesn't seem to make any difference. Any suggestions as to what I can do to stop this problem? It's very frustrating for my wife because her machine slows down so much and her mouse doesn't work. It's frustrating for me because every time she logs off of Firefox and her games, I have to fix her machine!

Answer 1

These are currently mine, which are endlessly repeated. They are NOT errors, it's that Apple didn't bother to update the Permissions database along with Java updates. As long as you get the message at the end "Permissions repair complete," everything is fine. You are wasting your time doing Permissions repair. The problem has nothing to do with Permissions.
Instead, when this occurs, open Activity Monitor in Utilities. Check to see which processes or applications, if any, are hogging the CPU. Those games may be using huge amounts of Flash (through Firefox) not Java. (If you have disabled Java, then, obviously, those games aren't running through that.) And your RAM and CPU may not be up to the task.Then switch to the Memory tab and see how much Free and Inactive there are. Also, what are the numbers for Page Ins, Page Outs, and Swap used? Also check to see how much Real Memory Firefox is using during one of these episodes.
Which Firefox are you running?
Message was edited by: WZZZ