OSX Behaving Strange, Finder Not Responding, Apps Not Responding

[Fr0dders]

So a couple of days ago I opened a diaglogue box in chrome and clicked on "My Desktop" this then froze the entire machine and the only way to get it come back was to reboot. When it came back finder would crash straight away upon logon saying "not responding"

I tried various bits and pieaces but in the end, gave up and restored from a time machine backup from a few days ago when everything was fine.

This was then initially fine, but now its started behaving the same way again. Itunes is completely trashed, and completely locks up the machine as soon as I try and launch it. The same with word. I've tried re-installing itunes but this hasn't helped. And now other apps start doing it like utorrent that were previously fine.

I've rebooted into safe mode, and used disk utility to repair disk and repair disk permissions. The repair disk did nothing and the repair permissions did find a load of stuff, but not files in the directories of the apps that are behaving this way.

Also, once the app does this, then causes finder to lock up as well. Relaunching finder won't work and the only way to get the machine back is to power it off and power it back on again.

Should I bother restoring from an even earlier time machine backup ? or is there something else fundamentally wrong here. Fior the first time in 4 years of mac ownership I'm now completely at a loss as to what to try next.

Help !

 

[MagicBoy]

Try re-applying the latest Combo update for OS X. Has to be the full 1GB+ combo file.

 

[theheyes]

My money is on failing RAM or hard drive.

 

[Fr0dders]

Sometimes you just have to write it all down to see what was staring you in the face for the whole time.

What have all the apps got in common ? what was I doing when finder crashed ?

The answer is my NAS. itunes of course has its library on the NAS. Utorrent was attempting to move files to it and finder was crashing when browsing it.

So its the data on my NAS thats corrupt, not the mac. Turned the thing off, and itunes fied straight up. It couldn't play any songs of course, but the whole "application not responding" solved and I could browse the store etc.. no problem. Finder hasn't crashed since.

Now time to run a full check disk on the NAS. Thanks for the suggestions guys.

 

[theheyes]

The question is whether it's a disk or the NAS OS, because I've seen both be the root cause of similar problems. If your NAS has the ability to email you alerts that would be handy to give you a heads up in the future.