[jim_julian_MW]

Over the past few months I've been having a slow start slow op problem and have posted a couple of times working that.
Now I'm on a trip to the Middle East and China and things have turned south. Safari won't start (Firefox OK), Mail won't start, Cocktail cannot do daily or weekly cron but can do monthly (Onyx the same), Skype loads but won't log in properly (spin bball). I've done all the normal stuff. Repaired permissions, tossed prefs, reinstalled Cocktail and Onyx, etc. In a new user Skype works OK but the rest of the culprits cited above don't change their behavior.
I did an archive and install ... no change. I've been pretty aggressive in throwing away prefs in Mail and Safari ... I think I got them all.
I repaired disk from the install CD ... no discrepancies. Within the last ten days I did the DiskWarrior thing.
If I was at home I think I'd wipe the HD and start over but here on the road I don't have all the apps I need and I don't want to hose my VPN back to my company.
Any suggestions?

[irene]

It sounds like you did all the appropriate things to try and correct it. I suspect you know more than I do about trouble shooting, but, since no one has jumped in, I have a thought. Does logging in as a new user help? If so, that would let you use more apps successfully although I don't know how the VPN connection works and if you could access it from a different user.

[jim_julian_MW]

Irene, thank you for your thoughts. Quoting from my original post:

In reply to:

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In a new user Skype works OK but the rest of the culprits cited above don't change their behavior.

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... doesn't seem to help much.

[jdb8167]

One thing to try is creating a new user and see if the Applications work correctly from that user. If that works, then the easiest thing is to recreate your whole user Library folder. Keep a copy of the old one, delete the Library Directory for your broken user, and log out and back in. Now use the backed up Library to replace things like preferences and bookmarks as they are needed. If something breaks, you will have found your problem.

[jim_julian_MW]

Thank you jdb. Quoting from my original post:

In reply to:

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In a new user Skype works OK but the rest of the culprits cited above don't change their behavior.

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you can see that I tried a new user as one of my initial troubleshooting steps. In a new user I still cannot launch Mail or Safari nor can I accomplish daily or weekly cron tasks using the Terminal or Cocktail/Onyx.