Loren Ryter wrote:
I found almost all of them manually with various 3rd party tools and embedded them all.
All you have to do is locate the corrupted image, when you get a "out of bounds" and excessive RAM use, that indicates either the program (screensaver) or one of it's files isn't correctly reporting a end of file, so it's sucking up all your memory. I've seen this sort of thing occur before.
Loren Ryter wrote:
There's nothing else that indicates any corruption, I can scroll randomly through my Music library and see all the artwork at any point.
Visual is no true indicator, I suspect one or more of your album images has more to it that it says, like either malware or something about it's size is incorrect, why it's eating up all your memory.
Loren Ryter wrote:
Logging in as another user is not a test, because of course it's something about my library: I say the size of the library, you say a corrupted artwork file.
Your deciding to remove your iTunes screensaver itself, for all users, so you can't test the theory that it has to do with one of your artwork files.
The album art is user specific, why logging into another user will test the theory if it's the screensaver or your files in the other user.
If you log into another user, place iTunes music in that user from the Store with images gotten from there, then run the screensaver, you'll find out right away if it's the screensaver that is actually to blame or your first user album art like I suspect.
The screensaver is just a program, works fine on tens of millions of computers, your files are by far more likely the cause.
Loren Ryter wrote:
At any rate, I wonder if I can simply trash:
/System/Library/Screen Savers/iTunes Artwork.saver
or whether that will cause unknown problems, and still use "Random" screen saver? I suppose I'll just try.
Good luck getting it back, your deleting the screensaver program when your real problem is likely going to cause a problem later.
You can do a 10.6 overwrite, c boot off the 10.6 disks and simply reinstall OS X, then log in and immediately update to 10.6.8
That would replace OS X and Apple bundled programs (like iTunes/screensavers etc) leaving your files and most programs untouched. However if you installed third party programs that have "hooks" or kext files in OS X , those get kicked out and those programs will need to be reinstalled.
You can do all that, only to find out it REALLY is your users album art files, and wind up creating another user to test the theory with a few songs from iTunes Store.
I highly suspect whatever program(s) you used to retrieve your album art retrieved a corrupted image off of Amazon, or Walmart or someplace else off the Internet with either malware (for Windows so it doesn't work on a Mac, but still gives headaches) or the image has gotten corrupted somehow from bad bits on the drive failing.
Magnetic media sometimes fails, could be cosmic radiation or something that throws off just a bit here and there, resulting in files/programs that all of a sudden start acting strange when it didn't occur before.
The only remedy is to replace the affected file or program, or even OS X, with a fresh copy.
The easiest is to replace the affected file, replacing the screensaver requires a OS overwrite install, which is more risky and requires more work.
Luckily with 10.6 it's a rather easy method to c boot off the 10.6 installer disk and reinstall, 10.7 requires a fast Internet connection a lot of people don't have.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3358920
I've done led the horse to water, but I can't make it drink, good luck. 🙂
