Mail causes erratic system behavior

[fmillion]

I have not updated to 10.6.5 yet, so this could be due to 10.6.4, however it has not ever happened before today.

 

When launching Mail on my Core i5 hackintosh (Gigabyte P55M-UD2), the entire system begins to behave erratically and becomes unusable. The following behavior occurs:

 

* After launching Mail, it hangs for a brief moment with a spinning beachball. This is not uncommon and happens from time to time even on real Macs.

* After the beachball goes away, the Title/Menu bar freezes on Mail and I am unable to switch to another application. (Or, if I happened to switch to another app while Mail was launching, the system becomes stuck on whichever app I had focus on.)

* Attempting to switch to another app becomes impossible. Pressing Command+Tab causes a system beep and nothing happens.

* Sliding around the Dock works (magnification is on and follows the mouse) but clicking an app does not launch it (the app never begins bouncing.)

* Windows that were minimized to the Dock can be maximized again, however they cannot be activated if they are not part of the current application (clicking in them does nothing, same as a window for an app in the background - clicking on the window does nothing.)

* The Menu bar still is functional for the foreground app. For example, I can still go to File -> New and compose new mail.

* If I Quit the application that the menu bar is stuck on, the menu bar and dock both disappear entirely. Looks like a Finder crash.

* Trying to open the Force Quit dialog does nothing at all.

* I tried launching the on-screen keyboard and using it while the system is in this erratic state, and it behaves exactly as if the real keyboard keys in question were being pressed.

* Console and all system logs show absolutely nothing at all out of the ordinary.

* The only solution to bring the system back is a forced reboot via the motherboard reset button.

 

I'm hoping to get out (read: find) the flash drive I have with the bootloader scripts I wrote to reinstall the bootloader and perform the 10.6.5 upgrade, but I was just wondering if anyone has observed this very odd behavior before on 10.6.4?

 

FM