System-wide freezes seemingly caused by Safari

A number of posters to Apple's Discussion boards are reporting an issue where Safari apparently causes a system-wide freeze that can only be escaped via a restart of the system.

Poster Thom F. offers a typical case example:

"The past week or so, my iBook has been acting tempermental. While browsing in Safari, a web page would take a long time to load. At that point, everything freezes up. I can not open any other apps. If I quit Safari and try to restart it, it does not start up. If I try to open other apps, they don't open. If I go the Finder in the menu bar to restart the computer, I get the spinning beach ball. I have to manually shut down the computer and restart it. It starts up fine. I am able to get into Safari and after browsing a couple of web pages, Safari freezes up again and the whole process starts over. Oddly, my Airport signal remains strong and consistant through all of this. I have tried repairing permissions and running Disk Warrior where no errors are reported but the problem still comes back. I perform regular maintanance on the computer to keep it running smoothly."

Another poster, Shain C. adds:

"The problem does seem to be specific to Safari. The last incident occured when clicking on a link. The blue indicator bar where the web addresses is displayed partialy loads, then the spinning beach ball begins.

"I've deleted Safari plist files, ran Macjanitor, Cocktail, repaired permissions, ran a plist verification tool, and ran Cache Out X. None of these solved the problem."

Users experiencing this issue may want to peruse our tutorial "Minimizing System-Wide Freezes where 'Force Quit' will not work" which contains several causes for (Bad RAM, USB Device issues, network traffic problems, background applications and more), and solutions to this issue.

Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.

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