[Murdoch]

Okay, I'm having a serious problem with my MacBook Pro 17 inch. It's about a month old and I'm still transitioning over.
The problem is I'm doing about 30 minutes to 60 minutes of work and then a black windowshade comes down and I get a multi-lingual "You must restart you Mac" message. I do so. On rebooting, I get the "Your Mac shutdown improperly" message, yet when I click "Report," nothing happens.
So I looked on the web and found there might be a problem with some Adobe software. I uninstalled it all. I also reinstalled QuickTime Pro. Didn't fix it.
Please help!

[jdb8167]

Have you installed third-party, non-Apple purchased RAM in the MacBook Pro? If you have, this is the likely culprit. What you are seeing is a kernel panic. They are rare with properly functioning hardware. The most common cause is marginal RAM. You may also get sudden random shutdowns with no display of an error message.
If you haven't added RAM, then it could be software but it is more likely to be from a bad installation of OS X than any individual program. Theoretically, software runs in user space and as such can't cause a kernel panic. Only bugs in system software can cause a panic. On the other hand, system software is complicated and it is possible to have a bug in an application that drives a undiscovered bug in the system software that causes a panic but it is rare. The most likely software that could cause kernel panics is device drivers or software that installs kernel extensions like Parallels or CoreDuo Temp.

[griffman]

Did you add any RAM to your machine? Are there any peripherals attached to it?
-rob.

[Murdoch]

Thanks!
I have 2 G of memory, and it came from Apple with the machine.
I have installed a printer, once, but I there are no peripherals attached to it right now -- and there weren't during any of the episodes I described.
I haven't installed the software mentioned. I did install about 25 to 30 different shareware programs, mainly Mac Gems I'd been using on the old PowerBook (e.g., QuickSilver, CopyPaste, WeatherMenu, iClock, iAddressX). I got rid of all these from my list of Startup Items, however, to see if that would fix it, and it didn't.
I guess I'll take the machine into an Apple store.

[griffman]

It really sounds like bad RAM ... one thing to test would be to create a new user, login as the new user, work with the machine for a while, and see if it crashes again. Don't bring over any of the stuff from the other account; just play around with Mail, Safari, etc. and see how stable it is.
-rob.

[jdb8167]

You might also want to try to reinstall OS X before asking for service. Apple is probably going to make you do that anyway. If it isn't RAM or third-party software, the most likely cause of frequent kernel panics is a bad installation of OS X.
You should also do these steps: Troubleshooting a MacBook Pro that won't turn on. Ignore the title, these are general troubleshooting steps you should always take when you have problems on a MacBook Pro.

[kam61799]

I recently had to return a 15" MBP that was giving me serious kernel panic (the grey screen and multilingual restart command) issues and the culprit turned out to be a faulty logic board and something to do with Airport. I would have the system crashes consistently every half hour or so, but they did disappear once Airport was disabled. There is a lengthy discussion on this topic over at the Apple Support forums.
Hope this helps and good luck getting your problem taken care of.

[Murdoch]

I wanted to thank everyone.
I saw a "Genius" today in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he gave me an external drive with the current Mac OS X to install, which I did. (We had a funny moment when I said, "Okay, thanks. And when I'm done, I'll give you the drive back," to which he replied, "Yes, it'd be good if you did that.")
Here's hoping it work.s