Problem after Update, mosts apps will not run

Question

After running some Apple updates this weekend, many applications on my machine no longer work. Everything ran fine before the updates. I have not installed any other new software or hardware for months.
Any one know what's going on?
The following apps do not work ... I click on them, they bounce, then I get a submit error
Firefox
Safari
iPhoto (this gets to the point of showing photos)
iTunes
The following applications do work
Mail
Terminal
System Preferences
MS Word
I have tried creating a new account and running the apps, and that does not work (in the new account, the menu bar keeps disappearing and reappearing implying the Finder keeps crashing.
Mac OS X 10.3.9
500 MHz PowerPC G3
320MB SDRAM
Running iTunes from terminal ...This appears in the terminal
% /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes
2006-06-19 21:21:28.548 iTunes[365] CFLog (0):
CFPropertyListCreateFromXMLData(): plist parse failed; the
data is not proper UTF-8. The file name for this data could be:
Resources/Info-macos.plist --
file://localhost/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/
The parser will retry as in 10.2, but the problem should be
corrected in the plist.
Bus error
Running iPhoto
This from the terminal (note, it crashed already ... thus the
'recovery')
/Applications/iPhoto.app/Contents/MacOS/iPhoto
2006-06-19 21:24:18.858 iPhoto[372] Using library:
/Users/mikem/Pictures/iPhoto Library
dbgetdatastore: shadow is un-clean. recovering.
2006-06-19 21:24:25.647 iPhoto[372] CFLog (0):
CFPropertyListCreateFromXMLData(): plist parse failed; the
data is not proper UTF-8. The file name for this data could be:
Resources/Info-macos.plist --
file://localhost/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/
The parser will retry as in 10.2, but the problem should be
corrected in the plist.
Bus error
500 MHz PowerPC G3   Mac OS X (10.3.9)  

Answer 1

if you are having system wide issues archive and install would be the best bet. http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107120 first however, you must do disk repair http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214. hopefully you do not have severe directory damage. if disk utility finds errors it cannot fix, back up your info immediately. you can use a third party app like diskwarrior or techtool pro to attempt fixing the problem, and if it can't be fixed, you will have to erase and install your operating system. [ 8 ) ]