Unable to complete login after reboot

mdoorkeeper wrote:

> unable to login … The whole computer would hang and become

> completely unresponsive to any interface just after launching Finder.

I'm very familiar with this behaviour. There's a hint of this in my post 

things stop responding — without Boot Camp

towards the tail of a long topic that may be mostly about … Boot Camp.

> force shutdown using the manual button in the top right corner. 

Hint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control-Alt-Delete#Mac is recently updated. I can't find a technical explanation of how a forced restart (three fingers) is more graceful than a forced stop (one finger), but I'm fairly certain that there is a degree of grace. 

A three finger salute forced restart is typically followed by audible disk activity. I take this as a sign of the software/firmware/hardware doing its best to make things sane before the stop and chime time. 

I have forced restarts often enough without SAV to not worry excessively about data loss/corruption (I have backups, and so on). Whenever possible I'll ssh from another computer, to mine, then kill things in a fairly orderly way. 

In contrast: when SAV causes me to force a restart, I often find corruption of preference files for Finder and other applications that seem to struggle, at login time, in the presence of SAV. 

> rebooted in Safe mode, and uninstalled Sophos AV.  

For any computer that's bugged in this way, I would make the same recommendation. Disk repairs, disk image repairs, recreation of preferences, restoration from backups of FileVault etc. can be unexpectedly time consuming.  

> It has been suggested on another forum that the problem is that

> my computer was not connected to the internet

> at the time I restarted. 

In my experience: I doubt that. 

I have tested in a wide range of networked and offline environments, and with probably all possible configurations of SAV. 

> '08 Macbook 13" aluminum with 4gb RAM, running OS X 10.6.4

Here: 17" MacBook Pro, Intel Core 2 Duo, 8 GB RAM, Snow Leopard. 
In the past I saw this type of bug bite a few other Macs, just occasionally. Nowadays AFAICT it's only me (and you?) who get bitten. 

mdoorkeeper, a question for you. Ignoring Boot Camp for a moment: 

• do you use FileVault?

mdoorkeeper wrote:

> unable to login … The whole computer would hang and become

> completely unresponsive to any interface just after launching Finder.

I'm very familiar with this behaviour. There's a hint of this in my post 

things stop responding — without Boot Camp

towards the tail of a long topic that may be mostly about … Boot Camp.

> force shutdown using the manual button in the top right corner. 

Hint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control-Alt-Delete#Mac is recently updated. I can't find a technical explanation of how a forced restart (three fingers) is more graceful than a forced stop (one finger), but I'm fairly certain that there is a degree of grace. 

A three finger salute forced restart is typically followed by audible disk activity. I take this as a sign of the software/firmware/hardware doing its best to make things sane before the stop and chime time. 

I have forced restarts often enough without SAV to not worry excessively about data loss/corruption (I have backups, and so on). Whenever possible I'll ssh from another computer, to mine, then kill things in a fairly orderly way. 

In contrast: when SAV causes me to force a restart, I often find corruption of preference files for Finder and other applications that seem to struggle, at login time, in the presence of SAV. 

> rebooted in Safe mode, and uninstalled Sophos AV.  

For any computer that's bugged in this way, I would make the same recommendation. Disk repairs, disk image repairs, recreation of preferences, restoration from backups of FileVault etc. can be unexpectedly time consuming.  

> It has been suggested on another forum that the problem is that

> my computer was not connected to the internet

> at the time I restarted. 

In my experience: I doubt that. 

I have tested in a wide range of networked and offline environments, and with probably all possible configurations of SAV. 

> '08 Macbook 13" aluminum with 4gb RAM, running OS X 10.6.4

Here: 17" MacBook Pro, Intel Core 2 Duo, 8 GB RAM, Snow Leopard. 
In the past I saw this type of bug bite a few other Macs, just occasionally. Nowadays AFAICT it's only me (and you?) who get bitten. 

mdoorkeeper, a question for you. Ignoring Boot Camp for a moment: 

• do you use FileVault?