Well, I had heard some things about Panther, but everything seemed to be going so smoothly.
Now, everything on my computer is screwed up.
Every time I restart, my system preferences seem to vanish. That stuff I put in the Dock? gone. My Mail keeps randomly dying (telling me I haven’t configured a mailbox yet), and I’ve lost a bunch of messages. My web browser bookmarks are gone/ignored.
Worst of all, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and Indesign CS are all royally f’d up. They can’t recognixe files they saved three minutes earlier, and files I worked all night on are now hopelessly corrupted for no apparent reason. Needless to say, I’m kind of screwed for my big presentation today … so what the hell is going on!!! Need to fix!
Have you tried repairing permissions? Open your disk utiility, select your hard drive and hit repair permissions…
Others may have more advice, but if the screwiness started occurring immediately after the install, and repairing permissions doesn’t work, it sounds like you’ve got a corrupt install and may have to do a clean install. Did the update complete it’s install correctly with no errors or odd messages?
The first thing I would do is open up your Disk Utility (inside Applications | Utilities), select your partition with the operating system on it, and then click “First Aid”. When First Aid comes up, choose “Repair Disk Permissions”.
If that doesn’t fix your problem try creating another user. Log out, log back in as the new user, change things around, log out again and then log back in.
Did you lose your preferences for that user, too?
If you’re losing preferences for that user, it sounds like you may have had corruption in the upgrade. My suggestion is to back all documents and programs up, and then wipe and reload.
Just repaired permissions. I’ll restart and let you know how it goes. (Funny… hadn’t thought of repairing permissions. I had just tried it BEFORE the upgrade install, but didn’t think to do it after…)
If that doesn’t work, try an archive-and-install of Panther over itself. This should preserve your documents, user accounts, settings, etc., but may fix system-level problems that may be generating your symptoms.