System wide freezes since 10.5.5

Question

Ever since upgrading to 10.5.5 I've noticed the following sort of system-wide freeze on my iMac.
First, one application becomes unresponsive; you get the spinning beachball of death; you can still move the mouse around and click; every application becomes unresponsive, including the Finder. Only a hard restart works.
At first I noticed the problem in iChat, and looked into that. Hey presto, other users are experiencing the same problem with iChat, so I wrote to Apple/feedback and sat and waited. I stopped using iChat, and then found it happened in iTunes. Look at the iTunes discussion, and yes, there it is again, other users having the same problem.
I've repaired permissions, run Onyx, done everything I can think of.
Console doesn't have any useful (to me) messages. It says:
26/09/2008 18:47:48 mDNSResponder[17] Failed to obtain NAT port mapping 00048CF8 from router 192.168.1.254 external address 0.0.0.0 internal port 5353 error 0
26/09/2008 18:47:49 kernel jnl: disk1s3: journal replay done.
26/09/2008 18:47:49 fseventsd[40] event logs in /Volumes/Time Machine Backup destination/.fseventsd out of sync with volume. destroying old logs. (2414 4 2606)
26/09/2008 18:47:49 fseventsd[40] log dir: /Volumes/Time Machine Backup destination/.fseventsd getting new uuid: 4B7F4EF0-7E6D-4E02-80DC-4F9DD9FBDB89
26/09/2008 18:47:49 mds[34] (/Volumes/Time Machine Backup destination/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/E77C8009-6066-4242-A13D-CD5BAC0FB62 E)(Error) IndexCI in ContentIndexOpenBulk:Unclean shutdown of /Volumes/Time Machine Backup destination/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/E77C8009-6066-4242-A13D-CD5BAC0FB62 E/live.0.; needs recovery
26/09/2008 18:47:52 mDNSResponder[17] Failed to obtain NAT port mapping 0080A41C from router 192.168.1.254 external address 0.0.0.0 internal port 4500 error 0
26/09/2008 18:48:10 kernel BootCache: hit rate below threshold (10214 hits on 20429 lookups)
26/09/2008 18:48:39 mdworker[76] (Error) SyncInfo: Boot-cache avoidance timed out!
26/09/2008 18:48:51 mdworker[76] (Error) SyncInfo: Catalog changed during searchfs too many time. Falling back to fsw search /
That kernel bootcache looks ominous, but I have little idea what it means. I wonder whether it's something to do with Time Machine backing up. Of course, the above might just be totally unrelated to what's going wrong. (Looking at Console is I find rather like looking at a medical dictionary; it's truly frightening, but most of it never in practice seems to be a problem.)
Anyone else experiencing random system freezes only since 10.5.5? Anyone suggest what else I can try or look for in Console to pin things down a bit more?

Answer 1

Hello all,
Let me chime in on this also... I also experienced freezes immediately after I updated to 10.5.5 from 10.5.4 about 10 days ago. I had never had my Mac (Black MacBook with 4GB or RAM) freeze that much, so I concluded that it had to do with the update.
After multiple freezes, I brought the Mac to the Apple Store where a Genius did a disk check, hardware check and everything checked out OK. However, the random freezes remained. They then did an archive and install *back to 10.5.4*, but same thing, freezes remained. At random intervals.
Around that time, I noticed that if I waited long enough, the machine would return from the freeze and everything would operate normally after that.
I seem to remember that the first ever time I noticed the freeze was when I was working in the Mail application.
After my fifth successive daily visit to the Genius Bar, where they offered to completely format my internal drive, install a fresh copy of 10.5.4 and re-load my data back in. On this, they completely failed me, they returned my computer with half of the applications missing (the iPhoto application was not even on the drive), and my data partially restored.
I then decided to re-format my drive once again, use the 10.5.2 Install Disk that came with my Mac to freshly install the OS. Then immediately thereafter I downloaded the 10.5.5 combo installer and used it to upgrade to 10.5.5. Then, I selectively copied files from my Time Machine backup hard drive back to my internal drive.
Time Machine did not work for me when trying to restore e-mail mailboxes. It only partially imported the mailboxes I needed. Instead I had to do an "import mailboxes" from the Mail application and point it to the mailbox location on my Time Machine backup.
So, now I have a system that is lean and clean, I didn't install any "major" other applications using installers, just a few applications I drag-copied to the Applications folder.
The machine ran fine for a day or two, until I tried to move some mail from my inbox into another mailbox. Boooom, spinning beach ball again. I let the machine sit for about 5 minutes, and it came back. But this indicates that there is still an issue.
Since I also experienced this problem after going back to 10.5.4, I am wondering whether the 10.5.5 install does affect firmware or other device 'hardware' functionality that remains, even after reverting to 10.5.4. This is the only reason I can come up with for why the problem still existed when I went to 10.5.4.
Anyway, this post does not provide a solution, but merely some other data points.
Oh and by the way, I had never even started iTunes before this problem showed up again this morning. So, not sure whether it is related to iTunes.