Poorly MBP - Booting/Crashing Issues.

Question

Hi Folks,
Recently my MBP has been getting more and more ill, i've spent a lot of time trying tips and tricks i've found to see if i can resolve the issue. The most odd thing seems to be that the problem only really occurs at work, when attached to an SBS2000 AD domain, at home it works fine.
The list of issues are:
1) Frequent system crashes, lots of apps stop responding and Force Quit doesn't always do so..
2) Disk Images/USB Disks don't mount... the DMG's just sit there "attaching" whereas the USB drives don't mount at all.
3) Most irritating is that i frequently have to force shut down (press and hold power button) as the apps crashing mean Finder won't actually shut down correctly. When i have to reboot most times it won't reboot properly;
a) Some times the top bar will appear, but on the right only Spotlight, no other icons and nothing on desktop.
b) Other times it will appear to have booted up fine but will actually have crashed totally, i.e. you can't click on any icons/dock.
c) Some times the Dock will appear but no desktop icons.
Invariably i will have to disconnect the Network Cable, disable the Airport and also remove the external USB HDD and eventually after a couple more attempts the machine will boot up fine....
4) Frequently the machine won't wake from sleep, i get left with a spinning beach ball of doom... I have applied the latest Firmware as i know this was an issue with early units (mine's an early model)
I've repaired disk permissions with Disk utility, run the Apple Hardware Test (came back fine) and tried lots of other little tweaks (MacJanitor etc) I downloaded a program WhatSize to see where the large files were as i was preparing to reinstall Tiger and noticed that my Entourage/Microsoft User Data Database is 22Gb! I am the SysAdmin so have a couple of Mailboxes open at once... could this rather large amount of data being sent back and forth across the network cause the problems, or are there other things i should be doing???
Please help if you can as i'm going mad
Thanks
Scott
MBP 2.0Ghz, 2Gb RAM, 100Gb 7200rpm   Mac OS X (10.4.8)   Parallels

Answer 1

This one of the many reasons I say people should move off Entourage. Here on my personal website, I explain how:
http://www.macmaps.com/entouragemigration.html
But the fact images won't mount, says that your mounting preferences or cache may be corrupted. You can try a different user to see if the problem persists there. At least that will tell you if the problem is systemwide, or localized to your user.
The fact it only happens at work, says something is wrong with the firmware of the router you use at work, or that the power supply at work may not be clean.
I would repair permissions and see if that improves matters as well. Do that with Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility.
Also don't use any other utility other than a backup utility, Macjanitor or Anacron. Utilities such as Cocktail, AppleJack, Onyx, Macaroni, Tiger Cache Cleaner can cause the issues you are seeing if run at the wrong time because system caches are constantly written to, and if one of those programs should interrupt the writing of those files, those can become corrupt and cause systemwide degradation of the sort you've been seeing. I've seen it happen on few people's machines. Most important is that you backup your data now, just in case these are also symptoms of a dying hard drive.