Entourage and Finder stop responding

[tlxreed]

Hi all,

I'm assisting a user with an Entourage problem. It's Entourage 11.3.4
running on OS X 10.4.8 on an Intel iMac. The symptoms are similar:
every 2-4 days Entourage cannot be quit. The mail browser stops
responding. Then the Finder stops responding, so that windows will not
close. The Force Quit window will can be launched but clicking on the
OK to force quit Entourage will not work.

In fact, the only way I've found to get out of this loop without a
hard shutdown of the system is to use Fast User switching. I can log
in to an admin's user login, run Activity Monitor, and force quit the
user's Entourage instance from there.

Today when the problem occurred, I did a a force quit Entourage, the
Finder, and the Login window (stuck open as the restart command
stalled there) from the admin login and then the user's apps and
Finder went back to normal. So I didn't even restart the machine.

To date I've tried rebuilding the Entourage d/b, zapping the PRAM,
deleting Microsoft/Entourage plist preferences, copying over a fresh
copy of the Office suite and running disk repair.

In the console I see repeated 'crashdump' messages but there's so many
references I'm not able to make heads or tails of them. Perhaps they
are normal for system messages.

Today I went a little further and deleted the following plist files:
ardagent, loginwindow, and remotedesktop.

I was going to reinstall the OS but thought it would be more useful to
try to pin the problem down further before doing so. Any suggestions
or tips appreciated.

 

[Joel McIntosh]

(1) If the system freezes indefinitely without your intervention, you might
want to look here:

http://www.entourage.mvps.org/troubleshoot/performance.html

(2) If the system freezes for 2-5 of minutes and then unfreezes without
intervention, then Sync Services may be the culprit. You may find it
valuable to review the information here:

http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq_topic/sync_services.html#upgrade2

Review suggestions 2, 3, and 4 (3 & 4 are easier and less "dangerous" for
your sync-ed data, so try them first).

 

[tlxreed]

Joel,

Thanks for your tips. I will read through them and see what I can
learn. One thing I did not mention is that this Entourage is sharing
an Entourage project with another user on a somewhat slow AFP server.
We don't generally see timeouts on the server but it's not exactly
high performance.

That's on my list of possible problems, the shared project. There are
only two Entourage instances at this location that share a project,
and this computer is one of them so it's a possible suspect to me.

Todd