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Causing Mac OS X to completely freeze up.

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  • 42 have this problem
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  • Last reply by ssd53

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I have been having complete freeze-ups lately, about one (max. 2) per day (I use the computer for several hours a day). I started noting down which program I was using at the times when my machine freezes and so far every single time has turned out to be Firefox. I use a few other programs for extensive amounts of times and none of them were frontmost (or even running, I believe) when the freezes happened. This makes me think Firefox is the source or at least what triggers the freezes.

The freezes happen randomly from what I am able to tell. They have happened right when submitting a form as well as when I am simply reading a page and not doing anything at all with the mouse or keyboard.

This started happening before I upgraded to Firefox 4 (so with Firefox 3.6) but it has become a lot more frequent after I upgraded (which is why I started tracking the frontmost application at the times of the freeze-ups since I began to suspect that it was Firefox).

The freeze-ups have manifested themselves in a few different ways so far:

  • everything on the screen "freezes" and any type of input, whether it's the keyboard command for force-quitting the frontmost application or clicking anywhere on the screen, has absolutely no effect. only the mouse cursor still moves
  • the same as above but I can't even move the mouse cursor
  • the screen goes blank
  • the screen turns white

The last two may also appear with many thin vertical lines running across the screen.

I have been having complete freeze-ups lately, about one (max. 2) per day (I use the computer for several hours a day). I started noting down which program I was using at the times when my machine freezes and so far every single time has turned out to be Firefox. I use a few other programs for extensive amounts of times and none of them were frontmost (or even running, I believe) when the freezes happened. This makes me think Firefox is the source or at least what triggers the freezes. The freezes happen randomly from what I am able to tell. They have happened right when submitting a form as well as when I am simply reading a page and not doing anything at all with the mouse or keyboard. This started happening before I upgraded to Firefox 4 (so with Firefox 3.6) but it has become a lot more frequent after I upgraded (which is why I started tracking the frontmost application at the times of the freeze-ups since I began to suspect that it was Firefox). The freeze-ups have manifested themselves in a few different ways so far: * everything on the screen "freezes" and any type of input, whether it's the keyboard command for force-quitting the frontmost application or clicking anywhere on the screen, has absolutely no effect. only the mouse cursor still moves * the same as above but I can't even move the mouse cursor * the screen goes blank * the screen turns white The last two may also appear with many thin vertical lines running across the screen.

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This lockup occurs more frequently for me if I have mythtv open.

It randomly locks up if I do this: 1) open mythtv 2) switch to the space firefox is on 3) start typing in the address bar

Most recent lockup, I was able to ssh into my mac. I tried killing firefox (eventually with -9 ) and it would not die. (Mythtv did die easily when killed.) Since -9 didn't kill it, it must be stuck in some kind of unkillable I/O wait.

Even after I killed all my user processes, the screen did not change. This is some kind of OS level GUI lockup.

These lockups started occuring for me immediately after upgrading to OS X 10.6.7 from the previous minor relsease.