[OS X TeX] (OT) Tiger and not Tigrrrr :-)?

[Herbert Schulz]

Howdy,

I have had a continuing battle with instabilities in Tiger.  
Occasionally the OS would spike CPU usage to 70-90% and a user  
process would not be able to respond to signals; this would show up  
as a ``xxxxx not responding'' message in Activity Monitor (I never  
needed to look in Activity Monitor and Console in any other version  
of OS X). E.g., once in a while when I would try to put my system to  
sleep the loginwindow process would take a very long time to come up  
and display the dialog box.

I put 10.4 on my system using Archive & Install and believe(d) that I  
had been very careful about putting things I needed back into my  
system from the Previous Systems folder. I completely re-downloaded  
and installed TeX, etc., etc., (see, I guess there is some vague  
connection to the topic) and the few extras I knew were ok (Macaroni,  
CocoAspell (latest version)). But that problem persisted.

I knew that Virex 7.x (I had used v7.2 downloaded from my .Mac  
account and never updated to 7.5 because of reported problems with  
Panther) was a problem with Tiger but felt that the Archive & Install  
should have removed all the harmful things from the /System/ and / 
Library/ folders. Remember... I was careful about what I restored  
from the Previous Systems folder.

Seeing <http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301291>, I  
downloaded the un-installer (destaller?) and ran it; the script is a  
series of `rm -fr` commands run as root to delete all traces of the  
given version of Virex.

Lo and behold, I haven't seen the problem for almost two weeks now  
when I was almost sure to see it about every other day before.

My advice is to definitely delete all traces of Virex using the un- 
installers mentioned above if you EVER had Virex on your system. Now  
I call OS X 10.4 Tiger rather than Tigerrrr or Tigrrrr.

Post Script: Now I'm sure that five minutes after sending this email  
my system will totally freeze to show its contempt for me! Just  
waited 5 minutes and all is still well. Maybe I'm still a bit paranoid.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest.com)


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