System Freezes Randomly after 10.6.3 Update

Glad to know I'm not alone 🙂

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? No
4. Mouse clicking does nothing? Yes
5. Keyboard key presses do nothing? Yes
6. Only way to re-animate system is by holding down power button? Yes
7. Mouse/Keyboard Model? Magic Mouse & Apple Wireless Keyboard

I haven't seen any artifacts before the crash. In fact, 10.6.3 finally fixed the artifacts I have been seeing in Safari Top Sites.

Yesterday my Macbook Pro worked fine all day (after 4 crashes the day before). On my iMac (with the same software and synced with MobileMe) I haven't experienced any crashes.

However, I do note that my Macbook Pro is not as responsive as with 10.6.2. Lots and lots of disk activity.

Thanks for this tip. I think I had two LCC's installed simultaneously. Removing one of them stopped the freeze-up. (So far, so good!)

I had the same problem as well. Ran all kinds of hardware checks everything came back passed. I did a complete reinstall of 10.6 and then updated to 10.6.3 through software update tool and it immediatly started freezing up again. I once again reformatted HDD and reinstalled 10.6 and then only installed the 10.6.2 combo and I get no freezing at all. I am not updating to 10.6.3. Will wait for the next update to make sure the problem doesn't happen again. This was the only thing I found that fixed my problem.

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. Mouse clicking does nothing? Yes
5. Keyboard key presses do nothing? Yes
6. Only way to re-animate system is by holding down power button? Yes
7. Mouse/Keyboard Model? Magic Mouse and Aluminum wireless keyboard

Using a Mac Pro with 2 3Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon procs and I immediately began having lockups and freezes with 10.6.3. I pulled all the drives, reinstalled on a fresh root drive, updated to 10.6.3 again, same thing. I've since done a safe boot, cleared all caches and preferences, ran a memory test in single user mode, and nothing helped or showed any hardware abnormality.

Finally last night I reinstalled 10.6 on a fresh drive and installed the 10.6.2 combo and I have yet to lock up again (knock wood). I will not be updating this machine again until a definitive fix is released.


Edit: I also ran 10.6.3 v1.1 for a couple of days and experienced the same lockups.

Here are the answers:

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 (it hangs for about 30 seconds first, then moves)
4. Mouse clicking does nothing? Yes
5. Keyboard key presses do nothing? Yes (but capslock still registers, fwiw)
6. Only way to re-animate system is by holding down power button? Yes
7. Mouse/Keyboard Model? Apple USB keyboard and Logitech USB mouse

Message was edited by: sysvr4

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. Mouse clicking does nothing? Yes
5. Keyboard key presses do nothing? Yes
6. Only way to re-animate system is by holding down power button? Yes
7. Mouse/Keyboard Model? Apple Aluminum KB w/number pad (wired)/Apple Mouse

*What graphics card does everyone have?*

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? Mighty Mouse/Apple Aluminum /number pad
ATI,RadeonHD2400

This update looks like a windows update because before the 10.6.3 I think I only had had between 2 to 10 system freezes since I bought my imac 2 years ago, but after the 10.6.3 I have had at least 15 system freezes.

Message was edited by: magofdl

Message was edited by: magofdl

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? No
4. Mouse clicking does nothing? Cannot Click anywhere
5. Keyboard key presses do nothing? Cannot type anything
6. Only way to re-animate system is by holding down power button? That didn't work.
7. Mouse/Keyboard Model? A1255 Wireless Aluminum Keyboard, A1296 Magic Mouse

Essentially, I lost the the bluetooth wireless devices and had to to plug in the older mouse and keyboard. I reset the PRAM using this and it seems better, but who knows. I must say I'm disappointed, and my Mac has no third part anything on here.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379

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? No
4. Mouse clicking does nothing? No
5. Keyboard key presses do nothing? No
6. Only way to re-animate system is by holding down power button? No
7. Mouse/Keyboard Model? Trackpad

I'm curious about a few things about these reports:

• For those who did a "clean" reinstall Snow Leopard & update it, did you import anything at all from your backup or did you allow Setup Assistant to run & manually type in your computer & network settings & create the first (default) user account by typing in a new user name, etc? (A system can't necessarily be considered "clean" after anything was imported/migrated from a previous version.)

• Did you download a new copy of the updater(s) you used or use any of them previously downloaded & saved to disk?

• Did you have any peripherals connected during the install or update process besides the necessary ones for basic operation (mouse, keyboard, & monitor if not an iMac)?

• Did you run Disk Utility's "Verify Disk" check on your startup drive before you downloaded & ran the updater?

What really puzzles me about this is there seems to be no discernible pattern for who is affected & who isn't. Obviously, a lot of users aren't -- we expect to see a disproportionally high percentage of reports of problems here because this kind of forum draws more posts about problems than about not having any, but even most of the problem reports in other topics don't mention freezes. And just as obviously (I hope), there are variations being reported here about the characteristics of the freezes among users that have them.

This suggests the possibility of different causes with similar but not identical symptoms. If everyone seeing freezes had them at the same time or triggered by the same action or something, or if only certain models or video cards or something like that was involved, then we could assume the same cause (& cure) would apply to all. But as it is, any clear correlation remains elusive, except the obvious one that it happens after applying the update. That by itself isn't enough to conclude that the update is the culprit -- if it were then everybody who applied it, at least to the same type of Mac or ones with something else in common, would also be affected. So far, it does not look like that is true, or if it is then it is a very obscure commonality.

I'm hopeful that the about questions will help eliminate the reports that might have another cause, leaving only those we can be certain do not, & thus reveal what commonality is involved.

I've just started to experience this freezing problem too. For me this seems more iTunes related than anything else only because I'm using iTunes a lot at the moment.

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

The only other things I can add are than I tend to use the terminal quite a bit and most terminal commands simply return an "operation not permitted" error once the system has hung ( I'd copy and paste the entire error but I can't... ).
The other interesting thing is that I ran iostat until the system died and for me the disk appeared to simply drop out. iostat stopped reporting on the status of the disk ( which is probably why nothing works ). I was wondering if anybody else can confirm this behaviour?

Richard

Same issue here;

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? Generic Microsoft Mouse/Apple Aluminum KB w/number pad

Interestingly having the same type of issues within Bootcamp (Vista); blue screens on display drivers (GT8800) as with as artifacting on screen and lockups

Crikey, this is concerning! I bought my first-ever mac about two months ago. It was the most expensive computer I ever bought and have been amazed at the instability of the much acclaimed OS. I've only seen this happen a few times while I was working on the system. For me it usually happens that I come back to my laptop, move the mouse, hit the keyboard and nothing happens. When I keep the power button pressed for 5 secs, I can see a flash of the login screen before the system halts.

R C-R:

1. After the clean install, I did use the migrate assistant to reimport old files, preferences, etc.
2. New copy of the updater.
3. At one point I removed everything except a single hard drive, monitor, KB and mouse and still locked up after a fresh install.
4. Yes, I ran both verify disk and repair permissions on the source drive of the migrate assistant, and the target drive for the install.

This is a 10.6.3 problem, make no mistake. I couldn't go more than about 4 hours without a lockup on 10.6.3 (or 1.1) and I've been running 10.6.2 for days without a single problem (using the same preferences, etc from migrate assistant).

Someone else asked about video card... got the ATI Radeon X1900 here.