Hi. I'm just checking in, since said I would keep you all updated. I spent a long time working with AppleCare Saturday. At that point, they were just starting to be aware of the flashback trojan; in fact, my very nice senior advisor had not even heard of it yet; she researched a bit and then called me back. They did not want to use the F-secure solution (the one posted on CNN) until they had done more research. I had been hoping they would walk me through that process (I'm not very computer savvy and I'm afraid to try it on my own), but overall I think they're taking a good approach - they want to be sure they know what they're doing and they want to find the best way to fix it. So, she had some other things to try in case it was not malware but was some other problem. We also did a lot of testing things (such as did it happen with a guest user, etc.) Nothing fixed the passwords-not-filling-in problem, and actually Sunday morning my computer generally was running a bit worse. Safari pages were loading slowly and I was having more keychain problems.
Since I paid for AppleCare when I bought this computer in December, and since I have Time Machine running and think I can pretty closely pinpoint when the malware came in, and since I'm lucky enough to live in a town with a genuis bar, I'm going to take the computer in Monday, have them erase the disc, and reinstall from my backup just after I'd switched to iCloud and done the update to Safari 5.1.5, but before the malware came in. I'm hoping that will solve the problem and if this thread is still open when I get the iMac back, I'll let you know if it worked.
I realize this doesn't help much in terms of a solution, but at least it may help pinpoint the problem. For instance, if I get it back and the problem is gone, then it seems that likely that in my case anyway, it was definitely the flashback trojan and not the Safari update (5.1.5). Because I seemed to have exactly the same symptoms Joel was experiencing, I think it likely is the mac flashback trojan and I'm very hopeful this will fix it. Thank you again, Joel, for finding a likely cause of the problem and letting us know.
