"The application Safari has unexpectedly quit." / "Archive and Install"

Question

...The system and other applications have not been affected.
Would you like to submit a bug report to Apple?
I was working on my eMac last night when all of a sudden Safari shut down. I tried to open it again and I kept getting the above error message.
At first, I thought this was no big deal, as I just downloaded Mozilla Firefox. However, it seems that whatever error caused this corruption in Safari has also affected my MSN Messenger, and a few other internet related Apps.
I don't know if any of you have come across this problem before, but it would be greatly appreciated if you could email me your suggestions to fixing this problem.
I called Apple support, and the lady suggest looking for a way to "archive and install preserving" so that I don't lose any of my important files. I'm sure that this might fix my problem as well.
Please let me know if you have a solution for me!!
Eric.

Answer 1

Eric Jackson Wood,
Welcome to the Apple Discussions!
Doing an Archive and Install because Safari unexpectedly quit is roughly akin to using several sticks of dynamite to take out a housefly in the kitchen. How much RAM does your Mac have, and how long had Safari been running continuously before the quit? Safari does have a known memory leak problem (the Safari 3 beta may have fixed that; too soon to tell for sure); if you have a minimal amount of RAM (256 MB or less), run multiple applications simultaneously, and leave Safari running for several hours, you can expect Safari to bog down. If you then try to load some types of web page constructs, the unexpectedly quit message isn't quite so unexpected. (Quitting and relaunching Safari every few hours is a viable workaround; in sever cases you may need to restart the computer as well.)
How were other Internet apps affected? Slowdowns, unable to connect, unable to find sites, or what? What version of MSN Messenger are you using? (MSN Messenger isn't known for being overly robust in the first place.) If a number of online utilities all begin to act strange at the same time, my first suspect would be the local network and the ISP. Is the problem still persistent after restarting the computer and after several hours (to allow the ISP to fix any glitches on their end)?
If Safari continues to misbehave, launch Safari and before going to any website, try going to the Safari menu and select the commands to reset Safari and clear cache, then restart Safari and see it that helps. If you have Safari set to open going to a homepage rather than opening a blank page, first move /Users/ [your_username]/ Library/ Preferences/ com.apple.Safari.plist to the Desktop before launching Safari to reset it and clear its caches. If Safari then works, you can quit it and try moving you previous preferences back; if Safari begins acting up again, trash the old preferences and re-enter your desired settings in a newly-created preferences file.