I don't know about the rest of you but every time my Mac crashes I 
have this nagging suspicion that I did something wrong--as a 
programmer that can be often true but not always.

What I have seen that I think more people should be on the watch for 
is a freeze in the Finder, basically it always occurs when I'm 
dragging some item in the Finder and that item passes over a folder 
(maybe other things but I don't remember).  This is a complete freeze 
even though Macsbugs is installed.

I'm fairly certain this is a bug in MacOS 8.6--the two Macs I do all 
my work on both run MacOS 8.6 (a 9500 & a 7600) with a very minimal 
number of third party extensions because of the problems I have had 
through the years, the common stuff is StuffIt Deluxe, PowerLogix G3 
Init, ATI software for video cards.  It could be a PowerLogix problem 
but I think I had this problem at work before I got that card.

I hope the way to avoid this is to turn off spring loaded folders in 
the preferences for MacOS 8.6--this is the main point of this email.

I'd love to hear from anyone who has also had this problem.  If every 
Mac had as many problems as I see on these two minimally loaded 
machines, we'd all be running Windows (I've crashed at work 
installing major applications after clean installing the OS).

Michael

ps. I'd install MacOS 9.x if all my programs were compatible, but I 
have at least two that are not and one is critical and would cost 
$300+ to upgrade (Excel 4.0 at home).  I say two because I think one 
is one of my startup apps and the machine was so unstable I moved 
back to 8.6 without testing anymore apps.  After spending weeks 
tracking down a conflict between MPW 3.5 with Fortran and Eudora 
4.3.3 (& 5.x) that Absoft (only maker of Fortran for the Mac) didn't 
have the resources to reproduce I'm tired of finding other peoples 
mistakes (experience says the problem is Eudora).  At this rate I'll 
have to have one Mac for every application--think I'm kidding, I can 
crash my 9500 for no good reason (of course I'm still using Netscape 
4.76).  I had assigned my problems to AfterDark since it crashed on 
both machines and removed it, but the problems continue but of course 
my screen saver no longer crashes.

mk.
-- 
Michael Kluskens <mkluskens@...>