I have recently been experiencing what I thought to be freezes. However
I noticed that programs continued to function normally and discovered
that unplugging the keyboard and plugging it back in fixes the problem.
This fix only works temporarily and the problem occurs again after some
time.
Problem occurs in various programs and in Finder.
I recently went through disc first aid and repaired permissions although
I'm not too sure if this is relevant.
I've seen a similar thing on a MAcOS 9.2 machine - thought the issue was
withthe mouse, it was otherwise the same. Replacing the mouse and
keyboard did not help, unfortunately. I was very reluctant to erase and
rebuild the machine (the next step after everything else I'd tried, ie
PRAM zap, prefs nuking, etc), as it would take me quite some time -
think Quark, Photoshop, etc etc on a DTP workstation. I eventually
swapped the hard drive into another machine to see if it was a hardware
fault.
The result was indeterminate - the problem never resurfaced on the
original hardware _or_ the replacement with the original hard drive. I'd
love to know what caused it, but at least it's gone away.
I'm not sure this is really useful to you, but I thought I'd let you
know that I, too, have seen intermittent USB problems with basic devices
on Apple hardware. Perhaps you might want to drop in a PCI USB card to
see if that helps (assuming Macs support them properly - anybody know?).
Craig Ringer
