A couple of months ago I rebuilt the family’s Mac Mini (you can read the details in this post).  Things had gone pretty smoothly until a few weeks ago.  That’s when my wife mentioned that different applications would spontaneously crash.

She kept track for a few days, and it turned out to be any or all of the applications that she uses (Safari, Quicken, Entourage, etc.) .

I did some online research and didn’t really find too much – but then how do you do a proper Google search for “Mac OS 10.5.8 applications crash”.  The best suggestion seemed to be issues around 10.5.8, where people suggested that you go back to a previous version (something like 10.5.6).  The only way to do that is to completely reinstall the OS – which is what I had just done.

SO, instead of doing that, I decided to just reapply the 10.5.8 update by downloading it from Apple (http://support.apple.com/downloads/Mac_OS_X_10_5_8_Combo_Update ).  I had installed the updates after the rebuild through the Apple Update mechanism built into OS X.  I thought maybe the combo update would reinstall some corrupted file (or something).

I did this about a week ago and sure enough, we’ve had one crash this week with the same usage patterns as before.  I still have no idea what was causing the crashes, but at this point, I’m just going to declare it fixed and move on.