Apple Toolbox
reports that users continue to experience intermittent mouse and
keyboard freezes or system stalls after updating to Mac OS X
10.6.3 - typically the cursor freezing in place or text input becoming
suddenly interrupted then catching up a few seconds later.
Personal Experience
Personally, I haven't encountered system stalls, but on my Unibody MacBook, keyboard
input will completely crap out, but the mouse and trackpad keep
working, so at least I can save my work and shut down applications in
an orderly fashion before rebooting. This is the only way I've
discovered to restore keyboard input.
And now that I think about it, I didn't notice this behavior prior
to installing the 10.6.3 update, although I only had Snow Leopard installed for a few
days before installing that update. (I finally got around to installing
Snow Leopard just a month
ago.)
According to Apple Toolbox, factors that can trigger this behavior
with Mac OS X 10.6.3 include Adobe Flash, Spotlight, outdated
drivers, and problematic startup/login items. On my rig, it seems to be
mostly associated with switching between Desktop Spaces using keyboard
commands (it's never happened that I can recall when using the Spaces
menulet).
Apple Toolbox suggests that the most effective workaround is a
downgrade to Mac OS X 10.6.2, and they say they've received word that
forthcoming 10.6.4 update includes new IOUSB files that should resolve
the freezes and stalls under most circumstances. Here's hoping.
Back to 10.5
In the meantime, not relishing (or having time for) the tedium of a
Snow Leopard downgrade to 10.6.2, and finally losing my patience with
having to reboot two or three times a day to get my keyboard working
again, I threw in the towel last week and reverted to Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5.8), which I
wisely kept installed on another hard drive partition when I installed
Snow Leopard. I will use it at least until version 10.6.4 becomes
available, which will presumably be soon.
Or so I had thought.
The thing is, on Sunday evening, some five days after I switched
back to Leopard, the keyboard crapped out again while I was editing an
article in Tex-Edit Plus, which is
where I do almost all of my non-email text entry. I quit TE+, and on a
hunch tried opening TextEdit, which comes with
OS X. Lo and behold, the keyboard kicked in again and stayed
working after I restarted TE+. It's therefore not exclusively a Snow
Leopard issue, although five days without an occurrence is longer than
I've been able to go with Snow Leopard for the past few weeks, and in
10.6.3 it's always happened when switching Spaces views and not when
just typing in an application.
I didn't try typing in TextEdit before I closed Tex-Edit Plus, but I
have tried typing in other applications when the keyboard quits working
in Snow Leopard without success. It's disappointing to have the issue
crop up in Leopard too, but I have to suspect either that this is a
different issue or that in some way it's associated with Tex-Edit Plus,
which hasn't been updated for quite some time. I'll report again when I
know more.
Another Leopard Benefit
In any case, I'm in no hurry at all. Aside from that hiccup, Leopard
is blessedly stable (I could often go a month or more without rebooting
when I was using it perviously), and my MacBook runs significantly
cooler in OS X 10.5.8 than in version 10.6.3. I thought that the
temperature increase might have been due to the arrival of warmer
weather, but I don't recall that happening last year. Downgrading to
Leopard has made the MacBook run 10° to 15° cooler, ranging
from the high 40s to the high 60s Celsius as compared with the mid-high
60s to the low-mid 80s in Snow Leopard, which kept the cooling fan
running pretty constantly, at least at low revs. With Leopard, the
golden silence has returned - a strong argument for sticking it out
with 10.5 as long as it's practical to do so.
There is little I miss from Snow Leopard anyway. It isn't noticeably
faster, and as a bonus, WindowShade X 4.x and Unsanity's Application
Enhancer system add-on work with rock solid stability in Leopard, while
I've found the Snow Leopard compatible WSX version 5 unacceptably buggy
so far. Snow Leopard's
Collapse to Dock Icon feature used in conjunction with Spaces and
Exposé provides a partial workaround, but it's not nearly as
slick as good old windowshading.
That issue aside, it appears that OS X development and bug squashing
efforts are lagging as a result of Apple's increasing iPhone
OS-centricity. Snow Leopard, in my experience at least, is the buggiest
version of OS X since version 10.1 nearly
nine years ago, and this dropped input issue in version 10.6.3 is
insufferable.
I'll give 10.6.4 a whirl when it becomes available, but if it
continues to run hot, I'll probably go back to Leopard again. It's so
much more pleasant.
