Mac Applications (mail, Safari, Ical, Installer, Etc.) Freeze On Startup

[jgregory]

Hi,
Bit of a problem: a number of the Mac applications (Mail, Safari, Address Book, Installer, ICal that I know of so far) for OS X 10.3.9 refuse to open. They will start to open and then go into the continually spinning disk, or they just freeze up before anything opens. Non-Mac apps (Firefox, Photoshop, Word, etc.) seem fine.

We had this problem once before which seemed to be resolved by entering the command "sudo plutil -s ~/Library/Preferences/*.plist" into terminal and then reseting the PRAM by holding down apple, option, p, and r at startup. We got these fixes off of this site then, but they aren't doing the trick now. We have also run disk repair and permissions repair from the fix disk to no avail.

We aren't tech people so any help would be appreciated as this is seriously messing with my productivity! Thank you much in advance!

John