1. Shut down your Mac.
2. Disconnect all third party USB and FW devices or anything that did not ship with your mac when it was first purchased from apple.
3. Check all connections and make sure they are plugged in and secure.
4. Give us more info on your mac (hardware wise) other than it's a G4. Which Mac is it? Tell us exactly how much available hard drive space is remaining on the boot volume (your main start up HDD) and what OS is running, and which version of QT?
5. What software do you have running on this mac? I can see you have FCP and DVDSP. Tell us which version of FCP you are running and the same for iDvd.
6. Do you have any Non-standard QT Plug ins on this mac (ie, Perian)?
7. Are you running from a server by any chance or is this mac communicating with a server of any type which might slow it down and cause the app to stall?
8. Go ahead and power up your computer. Assuming it starts normally, run apple's disc utility and repair permissions from apple's disc utility within the applications folder. You also need to dispose of the plist for iDvd immediately after repairing permissions. So go into your Home holder (the one that looks like a house) > Library > Preferences >
com.apple.iDvd.plist Drag and drop this preference to the trash. Now open system preferences and go to accounts > login items and take note of which items login on their own. If you see third party software launching on its own, then we need to disable these items for the time being.
9. Restart your mac now. If it doesn't start normally and simply freezes; then come on back for more troubleshooting and we'll walk you through how to boot from the software CD that shipped with this computer so we can repair the HDD directly from the software CD. When you get this far, come on back and tell us what happened to this point.
Message was edited by: SDMacuser
