System Freezes Randomly after 10.6.3 Update

Hi,

I have seen other people post various other problems they have experienced after 10.6.3. But I want to dedicate this thread specifically to Macs freezing randomly during operation after applying the 10.6.3 update.

It has happened twice in the past 24 hours. While using my iMac, the system becomes unresponsive and exhibits the following symptoms:

1. Though the mouse pointer moves, I cannot click on icons, links, select text or interact with anything using the mouse.
2. The system is also unresponsive to key presses on the keyboard, whether they be individual key presses or pre-defined keyboard shortcuts.
3. The only way to make the system respond is by holding down the power button until the iMac shuts down.

I cannot tell if the problem is related to the specific activity I was performing on the Mac - the freezing may seem random to me but it could be caused by the same event (maybe Flash, Javascript, or some background program)

If you are having the same issue, please post here by copying and pasting the text below and entering your answers:

1. Problem started happening after 10.6.3 update? Yes/No
2. Did you get any errors during 10.6.3 update process? Yes/No
3. Mouse cursor moves? Yes/No
4. Mouse clicking does nothing? Yes/No
5. Keyboard key presses do nothing? Yes/No
6. Only way to re-animate system is by holding down power button? Yes/No
7. Mouse/Keyboard Model?

I'll fill in mine to start:
1. Problem started happening after 10.6.3 update? Yes
2. Did you get any errors during 10.6.3 update process? No
3. Mouse cursor moves? Yes
4. Can you click anything with the mouse? No
5. Does the system respond to keyboard key presses? No
6. Only way to re-animate system is by holding down power button? Yes
7. Mouse/Keyboard Model? Magic Mouse/Apple Aluminum KB w/number pad

iMac 24" (Late 2008), Mac OS X (10.6.3)

Posted on Mar 30, 2010 11:06 PM

Reply
682 replies

Jan 9, 2011 11:11 AM in response to kremik

I upgraded from Tiger a couple of weeks ago on my 7,1 iMac and have had this problem consistently with 10.6.5. This is a brand-new installation from the Mac Box Set on a brand-new hard drive. Upgrading to 10.6.6 did not help. I tried creating a new user account and that didn't help either. I've tried just about everything else suggested in this forum. If I can't get it fixed in a few more days I'll just downgrade back to Tiger, so I can get my work done instead of troubleshooting my computer all the time.

Jan 12, 2011 7:00 AM in response to Tim Isham

There is a related thread regarding this topic (24" iMac Screen Freezes since 10.6.3 update - pls help!)

Someone may have found a solution to the issue - it's a little risky, but if you are willing to accept the risk and ensure that you have proper backups it may be worth a shot. It has worked for several people so far! It involves extracting the ATI video drivers from 10.6.2 and installing them over the current 10.6.3 or above drivers.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2384136&start=300&tstart=0

Jan 12, 2011 7:38 AM in response to nekosaur

I just upgraded form Leopard to Snow Leopard. After the upgrade, any app I opened would at some point freeze, indiscriminately.

What I mean by freeze is that the Menu Bar would freeze with the effected apps preferences across the top, the TAB+CMD scrolling would no longer work, I could not click into any fields nor could I click any buttons. The keyboard appeared to be disabled. With the mouse, I could still open, close (through the dock), and move apps around. Most of the time, I needed to either hard shut down or if the Mac Menu option was still working, choose restart. I searched high and low and never found an answer.

Then it occurred to me that there is always one service on this Mac working in the background: MobileMe.

When I changed the Auto sync setting to Manual, the freezing stopped and all became right in my world once more.

I am a much happier camper as I can now go back to developing an awesome new app for managing art collections....

Hope this helps everyone else...

Jan 13, 2011 2:13 AM in response to sherifhanna

I've been having occasional freezes for several months. I've been able to narrow down the cause, since the freeze has happened several times when doing the following:

In NetNewsWire, I press the down-arrow key to mark articles as read. Often - well, often when I get these freezes - I get a beachball when I get to a certain article, and my Mac becomes, for the most part, unresponsive. I can switch to some apps, music from iTunes keeps playing, but I can't launch any apps (I've tried to get Activity Monitor to launch so I could get a sample from NNW). I eventually have to force a restart, and there is absolutely nothing in console logs.

So it seems to me that this is a WebKit issue (which could explain why others are seeing these problems with Safari and Mail). It's most likely not a graphics driver problem, because these pages are not being rendered; as I scroll through them, only the feed info is being displayed in NNW's lower pane, but I think that, in the background, WebKit is doing something anyway.

Jan 15, 2011 6:55 AM in response to sherifhanna

I have started to experience the same issue after the 10.6.6 upgrade. Prior to that my MVPro has run flawlessly and very quickly for 18 months! After running ok for 5 minutes from boot up, the system freezes, spinning wheel for 20 seconds then 1 second blip of CPU and unfreeze then another 20 seconds freeze and spinning wheel, this cycle can repeat two or sometimes three and four times. I sit patiently then after 5 minutes I can us the laptop ok. Seems to reoccur when accessing a large data transfer to the disk. With activity monitor running I see a massive WRITE spike to the hard drive then it goes into the spinning loop freeze.

It's almost as if there is some form of cache overload on the disk transfer that hangs the io system and it takes 20 seconds to timeout or recover, then it blips with a second of cpu and then retries the io load and failure happens again.

If someone could tell me how I get back to 10.6.5 I would like to get vack to my brilliant working laptop 😟

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System Freezes Randomly after 10.6.3 Update

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