Hi Sigrid,
What has caused the problem? Few would know, as computers are incredibly complex. What other everyday appliances generate their own web sites to discuss their usage? Whilst Apple owns this site, the answers and suggestions provided, are from fellow users like you, not software or electronic engineers or Apple employees.
The emphasis is on finding a solution rather than understanding the cause.
Kernel panics and allocated memory dysfunction is the end result of any number of causes, predominately hardware related, but also sometime software. What is usually a given is that these are mostly non-Apple ware that has not competently tied in with the Mac architecture. However in some cases it can also be the computer hardware itself such as the logic board. Therefore, it is too broad a condition to pinpoint.
I tend to stay away from third party software as a lot of the shareware is just beta, meaning it works but has not been extensively tested. Also I don't use any maintenance software as the Mac keeps things running pretty well itself.
One thing worth impressing is that OS X does like a lot of free disk space to use for temporary file space, swap files and occasional optimisations so keep approx. 5 to10% of your total disk space empty if you can. A lot of problems can arise from an overful hard drive.
What would happen if I trashed all .plist files in the Library Preferences folder?
They would all be recreated next time you opened an application. The only problem you would find doing that would be your Mail account would have to be set up from scratch again, so don't trash that one. Once again, consider how much Hard Disk free space you have before you trash them which in this case, I don't think will achieve anything. Whatever is causing them to be altered will not be fixed by trashing what is altered.
the same permissions seem to be changed to the same new codes every time.
This is normal. See this article by Michael Conniff for a detailed explanation.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=121686
When not needed for a while, it is shut off and disconnected, which also applies for night-time.
This will prevent the automatic maintenance from being carried out on your 10.3 Panther machine as it is done normally overnight.
In response you can do this manually with a command in
Terminal.
In your Admin account, open Terminal, found In Application/Utilities and copy and paste the command typed below in the grey box, into it.
Press Return, and type in your Admin password which will *not be echoed* and will just appear blank as you type it.
After entering the password, press return and be patient as it works until the prompt returns. If no maintenance has been done for a while it may take a couple of minutes. It may appear as if nothing is happening, but it is working invisibly in the background. Don't interrupt it.
sudo periodic daily weekly monthly
When the prompt returns, type
exit and quit Terminal.
Just keep an eye on things and the next time an application crashes try and figure out what occurred just beforehand and try and reproduce the event in order to isolate and avoid that condition in future. With the maintenance you have now done, I hope it now runs well for you.
regards roam
