I installed 10.3 yesterday afternoon, and since then have had two extremely strange freezes. Both times, the machine became completely unresponsive (although iTunes continued to play erratically in the background), except the mouse, which would stutter, responding for a few seconds and then freezing for a few seconds. Force quit and immediate logout had no effect. All in all, these are freezes, barring the stuttering, indistinguishable from the good old days of OS9.

Also, what I was doing at the time doesn't seem to have been particularly relevant: the first time I had just submitted a web form in Safari and the second time I was emptying a particularly full trash can.

I've dug through all of the logs in (the new and improved) Console.app, and nothing interesting happened either time. Unfortunately, I didn't have a spare computer available to ssh in and see if the computer was responding in that way.

The only thing out of the ordinary about my Panther install is that I've got USB Overdrive running to power my Intellimouse.

Any brilliant ideas? Anyone experiencing the same problem?

It does sound like the mouse is a possibility. Have you tried replacing it with the original Apple mouse that came with your Mac?

Right now I'm looking at a number of culprits. Other than the Intellimouse Explorer with USB Overdrive (anyone using it on 10.3 without problems?), it could also have been iPulse, which I just noticed was using over a gigabyte of virtual memory (and growing, leak noted at versiontracker), causing my machine to page everything in and out pretty much constantly. If it's still possible to lock up the UI by paging in 10.3, then it should be possible for iPulse to lock up the whole machine by creating a situation where there it never stops paging and therefore becomes completely unresponsive. iPulse is off now, and we'll see if that helps.

Thanks for your help, I'll keep you all updated-
taavo

If you use a logitech mouse, there is a new driver called "Lcc" or Logitech Control Center, which works with Panther and eliminates any mousework problems.

I am experienceing the same problem on my TiBook/400 running Panther. Am NOT using USB Overdrive. Have not been able to figure it out and it's getting quite frustrating. It is happening about twice a day. At first, I thought it was related to iTunes so I dumped its prefs and rebuilt my library - that didn't help. Also have dumped prefs for InDesign & Illustrator thinking they had something to do with it... I also have a G4/733 & a G4/400 both running Panther and have had no probs with them. The main diff between those two machines and my TiBook is that I run iTunes, Mail, Safari, OmniOutliner, iCal and Address Book almost contantly on the TiBook whereas I ONLY run graphic design apps (Adobe, Font Reserve, etc) on the others.

Launch Activity Viewer, set the Dock icon to Show Memory Usage and keep an eye on it to make sure it isn't gradually going all red. You can also jump in when it gets close to "crash time" and sort the columns by Real Memory. See if one app gradually climbs the chart throughout the day.

Basically, the behavior described does sound a lot like a memory leaking app. I tried out Konfabulator 1.0 and discovered that a lot of the Widgets people had programmed had great huge memory leaks in them that way...

Since I turned off iPulse (the program that had an obvious and huge memory leak on my system), I haven't had a single problem. Uptime 55 hours and counting. Taylore's advice about the Activity Monitor is good. Open it every once in a while between crashes to try to find the program using up all of your memory.

On my system, the problem wasn't that a ton of active memory was in use, but rather that an incredible amount of virtual memory was in use. Typically (after running Safari, iTunes, Mail, AIM, Clutter, BBEdit, Terminal, Launchbar, X11 + Nicotine, Acqlite, Final Draft for about a month straight), my page file is about 1.2-1.5 gigabytes, but until I disabled iPulse, it would get up in the 2.5 gigabyte range in just a few hours, which is what I think killed my computer.

It just happened again. Now I'm going to turn on MenuMeters and watch my free memory shrink over time.

This really sucks. I feel like I'm running OS9 again -- the entire system could go down at any minute and I could lose a project.

Although not the exact same problem. I did have a similar one with my system completely locking up and sometimes generating code on the screen. I would always have to reboot. Each instance that I remember, I did have iTunes open and was thinking that was the problem. However, I removed my the drivers for my M-Audio Revolution sound card and the problem hasn't happened since. I'm not sure if you have this particular sound card, but you may want to consider other cards you may have installed as well as their drivers. The driver M-Audio posted is supposed to work with Panther, however I am still having problems with it.

Just something to consider...

-Nitescan

I did have a similar one with my system completely locking up and sometimes generating code on the screen.
Looks like a Kernel Panic to me. Very often hardware related: faulty RAM, for instance, or an USB hub playing up.