No Usable Wi-Fi After 10.6.3 Installation

Question

I installed the 10.6.3 update a week or so ago when it came out. No apparent problems. When I went back to the web, my late 2009 MacBook Pro seemed to be stuck. It takes forever to load web pages on Safari or Firefox. I just spent 30 minutes unsuccessfully trying to do a bit of banking that used to take a few minutes. The page never fully loaded. I am using a 1TB Time Machine that had given me no trouble whatsoever until I installed this update. I tried installing the "combo update" last night hoping it might overwrite the previous iteration and work, but this morning the message was image not recognized. I'm totally at a loss.
Does anyone have a suggestion about a fix?

Answer 1

AKC322, are you running anti-virus software on your computer? If so, the slowdown might be happening due to that software coping with the updated files in 10.6.3.
Regarding the slowdown in the browsers, you could try using a non-browser as an alternative download test, to see if the wi-fi slowdown happens there as well. Open Terminal, and enter *cd /tmp* and *curl -o testing.html http://www.myonlinebank.com/* (substituting your usual banking URL). The curl program will display download speeds as it goes.
About the unrecognized combo update image, you can check on that in Terminal as well. First you’ll need to change your current working directory to where your downloaded image is; perhaps something like *cd /Users/AKC322/Downloads* (substituting your usual login). From there, *ls -l MacOSXUpdCombo10.6.3.dmg* will display something like
-rw-r--r-- 1 AKC322 staff 822146518 Mar 29 08:57 MacOSXUpdCombo10.6.3.dmg
(presuming that you’d downloaded the non-server combo update). The fifth field (822146518) is the size of the image in bytes. If your image is smaller than this, then you might have an incomplete download; the download can be resumed where it left off by *curl -C -R http://support.apple.com/downloads/DL1017/en_US/MacOSXUpdCombo10.6.3.dmg* (presuming that that Apple server supports partial downloads). If your image is the right size, then try running *openssl dgst -sha1 -c MacOSXUpdCombo10.6.3.dmg* on it to make sure that it has the right “signature”, that no corruption occurred during download. The output should be
SHA1(MacOSXUpdCombo10.6.3.dmg)= 72:c1:26:35:cf:83:ab:6f:e0:28:dd:f8:1b:0a:f7:35:78:53:f7:36
If your image is the right size and it shows the signature above, then I’m not sure why the image wouldn’t be recognized.