I’m just wrapping up an all-day restoration of my MacBook Pro… complete with clean install of Leopard.
I was at a lunch the day before, talking up how my MacBook Pro has been running without a hitch, while everyone else was complaining about MacBook failures. I was asking for it… and boy did I get it today.
Basically, AirPort started locking up. I could connect to my network, and web pages would load, but any data-intensive requests locked up. For example, Mail would time out, and NetNewsWire would struggle to load pages.
At first I thought I was dealing with a bad AirPort Card. Booted up my USB 2.0 hard drive with a separate Leopard install… and everything was working. So, I realized it had to be an issue with something on my internal hard drive drive. I’m still not sure what went screwy. No filesystem errors, no bad sectors on the drive, cleared the caches, trashed all the network and AirPort plist files… and it still wouldn’t work.
My only option was to reinstall Mac OS X. And, I couldn’t recover system settings and user accounts. I tested with a second user account, and it was not working too. So, I know it was a system corruption, but I couldn’t rule out a defective plist file somewhere else in /Library.
What a waste of a day… now I’m reinstalling software, moving files back by hand, and setting everything back up. Thankfully, I have a 12-inch PowerBook G4 for when this happens, and I’ll be finishing the weekend with that.
Oh, and why I wrote this post… I suspect it may be Security Update 2008-005 that caused this problem, since I installed that right before the problems surfaced. If you are having any network issues after installing 2008-005, post away in the comments so I can help Apple pinpoint the issue.
Update: This is getting very annoying, and it has taken up too much time. I have to move on, and de-commission my MacBook Pro for a week. Wonderful (not). I have pinned it down to something in /Library/. But, it’s not a preference, an input manager, or a launch daemon, and it’s not a startupitem.
The result? I can’t trust anything inside of /Library/ and have to reinstall every single application by hand.
This really, really, feels like a Windows problem…