SWOD after receiving an IM, need to restart Mac

Question

Hello,
We have a workstation with Mac OS X v10.5.5 and the iChat version is 4.0.5. I have been told that iChat at this workstation will display a SWOD when incoming IMs are received, yet the incoming IM is never displayed. We know this much because we have asked people in our office if and when they have sent IMs to this user, and their responses correlate to what we are observing. Not every single incoming IM will result in a SWOD, but those that do start a significant downward spiral for the stability of the Mac.
I originally turned off the firewall, but that did not resolve the issue. I then deleted the iChat preference files in ~/Library/Preferences, but that did not resolve the issue either. Yesterday, I used Pacifist to reinstall iChat from the OS X v10.5.4 Leopard DVD, and I have been told that iChat presented the SWOD once today.
When these iChat SWODs occur, force quitting iChat does little good. Whatever is causing iChat to SWOD also affects other parts of the system. Even copying files in the Finder will fail after iChat SWODs. The only resolution to the situation is to restart the Mac. Unfortunately, this creates a situation where the user of this workstation needs a PowerBook just to iChat with people, as the risk of the computer falling into this effectively useless state is too great.
If anyone has experienced this problem, or can offer any suggestions on how to resolve it, I would appreciate it. At this point I am thinking my only course of action is to reinstall Leopard clean and hope the problem does not resurface. I would prefer to have proof that a clean install would solve the problem, rather than budget a day for this process and hope it is resolved. I suppose I could update to Mac OS X v10.5.7 first, but the release notes for v10.5.6 and v10.5.7 do not list fixes that match the description of what I am observing.
Thanks for reading!

Answer 1

Jonathan Abrams wrote:
We have a workstation with Mac OS X v10.5.5 and the iChat version is 4.0.5. I have been told that iChat at this workstation will display a SWOD when incoming IMs are received, yet the incoming IM is never displayed. We know this much because we have asked people in our office if and when they have sent IMs to this user, and their responses correlate to what we are observing. Not every single incoming IM will result in a SWOD, but those that do start a significant downward spiral for the stability of the Mac.
[snip]
When these iChat SWODs occur, force quitting iChat does little good. Whatever is causing iChat to SWOD also affects other parts of the system. Even copying files in the Finder will fail after iChat SWODs. The only resolution to the situation is to restart the Mac. Unfortunately, this creates a situation where the user of this workstation needs a PowerBook just to iChat with people, as the risk of the computer falling into this effectively useless state is too great.
If anyone has experienced this problem, or can offer any suggestions on how to resolve it, I would appreciate it.
This isn't guaranteed to show you anything useful, but those users might leave the Activity Monitor utility running with "All Processes" selected, the list ordered by CPU usage, and the lower CPU tab selected. When the problem arises, that at least could verify whether it's iChat that's spinning its wheels or something else.