I'm at wits end.  My mac-mini started screwing up in an odd way (dock wasn't showing, couldn't do a restart) that appeared permission related so I tried to repair permissions.  The error I receive is something like Disk Utitlity has "Lost Connection" with Disk Management tool" Please quit Disk Utility.  When I look in at the log file, all I see is a "buffer overflow!" message.  Nothing else. 

Research found a very similar problem associated with iTunes 6 on Mac OSX 10.3, but I'm running iTunes 7.1.1 on OSX 10.4 (and I tried the fix anyway and it did not work).

Deeper research found similar problems associated with a screwed up file or application, but the offending application/file would be displayed in the log file.  The "buffer overflow" I'm getting seems to happen right away.

The disk verifies fine.

Ok, I give up, I'll just restore the system from my backup... except the backup from 4 or 5 months ago has the SAME problem!!!

I don't want to rebuild the system from scratch because I had a lot of problem doing this the last time... although, I suppose, given the trouble I had doing the rebuild it's quite possible that this problem has always been there.  I did a complete rebuild about 6 mos ago when my upgrade to 10.4 failed midway (I was upgrading to run eyeTV).  I don't run "repair permissions" habitually so it's possible I never caught this.

Any suggestions aside from starting over.[:'(]

Thanks in advance,

Stan

britops:

Tried AppleCare? or Apple Genius bar?

My experience with the "Genius" bar is that the so called geniuses tend to be mostly geniuses in their own mind.

I may give AppleCare a whirl, but haven't ever had much luck with other company's tech support.

I will try other's suggestions... thanks for the help.

Stan

Stan:

britops:

Tried AppleCare? or Apple Genius bar?

My experience with the "Genius" bar is that the so called geniuses tend to be mostly geniuses in their own mind.

I may give AppleCare a whirl, but haven't ever had much luck with other company's tech support.

I will try other's suggestions... thanks for the help.

Stan

I have used Apple Care about 4 times and on three occasions, they were fantastic. Once I got someone who was simply not interested but I rang again the next day and they were fine.

The Genius Bar seems to be an American feature so I could not comment. 

Firstly, Repair Permissions actually does nothing of any use unless you have a highly-specific permissions related issue - which are very uncommon and in any case better resolved in command line. As regards your issue, I'd reconsider your plan to keep copying back your previous setup, which is probably re-introducing the issue each time. I know it's a pain, but you'd be better off in the long run to back up what you need, wipe the thing, install and update the OS, copy your data back over and reinstall any apps etc. one at a time.

Secondly, your comment about Apple's Genius Bar is uncalled for, IMHO, and may not go down too well with certain members of Beoworld ;-)

Best of luck getting it sorted.

Thanks.... I had no intention of restoring an image with the same problem.  I'm leaning toward not doing anything (aside from keeping my important data backed up).  As you say, repair permissions is not exactly mission critical.  The computer seems to be working after a re-boot.  Rebuilding from scratch is painful, and so why do it just because repair permissions fails?

Sorry if I offended anybody with my Genius Bar crack.  I suppose I painted with an overly broad brush...

Stan