the honeymoon is over, the new car smell has faded

[rone]

My Mac experience has quickly turned to shit.

• The M$ Office updater downloaded a huge update and then failed to install it.  I tried again and the result was the same.  Also, the file was nowhere to be found.  I ended up downloading and installing it manually.
• The OS X 10.4.6 update downloaded and failed about a quarter through the installation.  The file was nowhere to be found even though the failure message claimed i could locate it in the Finder.  I tried the updater again and now it hangs during "Checking for updates...", with the progress bar about 25% full.  I downloaded the update manually, but when it says "Select a volume for installation", my hard drive never appears.  It's just blank.
• I downloaded and installed the latest iPod update.  After a reboot, iTunes ran fine.  After another reboot, iTunes crashed when i ran it, and when i reopened it, it ate my library.

Needless to say, none of this ever happened to me on Windows.  So if any of you Macheads have any tips for dealing with getting the OS update to work, that would be swell.

Comments

[wisn.livejournal.com]

Corrupted font caches. Almost always, they only corrupt when you're using Office or Quark Xpress a lot. They screw with many things besides the applications that broke them. This is part of what makes the Mac unique.

Read this for diagnosis, description, and solution:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/313535

Alternately, you can pay $50 for shareware to type 'rm -r ~/foo/fontcache' when you tell it to:
http://www.insidersoftware.com/SM_fix.php