My MacBook Pro 17″ with latest Snow Leopard is showing all sorts of symptoms in the system, Text Edit (note my earlier post re: listing apps in a text file), strange messages at startup, crashing Adobe products…every session brings more surprises. My question: Given problems I have that I have no prayer of diagnosing, I want to clean-install Snow Leopard. Migration would only reintroduce the problems. So, I guess I need to re-install apps one or two at time, watching for the reintroduction of the problems. Is this the way you see dealing with this problem of a range of strange behavior? (Re-installing software that originally came from discs, or downloads, some with serial numbers, some with passwords, is my worst nightmare.) Thanks, Gary, as always.
— John Russell
Well, the way I see it, you have two choices. The first is to diagnose the problems and work toward getting your system healthy again. The second is the re-install you suggested.
I wouldn't rule out the first. Google those strange messages and see what you can do to stop them. Re-install only the Adobe apps that you have problems with and clear out their preference files for a fresh restart.
Don't worry about the TextEdit thing -- it was probably because you were pasting in Rich Text mode and there were a lot of icons to deal with.