Sorry for the OT mail, but I figured one of you might have seen something similar (and be able to express your responses in a way that makes sense to a Unix geek ;-)
I had a complete meltdown of our iMac last night (running Jaguar 10.2.1). Kernel panics (whenever I tried to ssh into work, but only then--I'm not kidding) hour-long fscking, config files that suddenly sprouted junk in the middle of them, and then when I finally got it into some semblance of stability, I discovered that all (like ALL) the 300+ user-installed fonts are no longer recognized by the system (only the default ten fonts existed anymore), my preferences in almost all apps have been damaged (Terminal had its windows set so small that they were just five or six pixels square and wouldn't let me resize them), and--weirdest--I can no longer drag files in the Finder, it's like they're glued in place, though I can manipulate them with the shell or by doing Cut/Copy/Paste. I guess I'm going to have to do a clean reinstall tonight, grr. Mac OS X seems to either be rock solid, or explosively unstable, and nothing in between.... Wondered if anybody else had a similar experience or might have some idea how to extricate short of reinstalling (after ten months of customization of this machine, that is a really unattractive concept). Trey
