i-Tunes and Quicktime not launching in OS 10.3.9

[Tamagazzi]

Hi there,

Recently,OS 10.3.9 kind of 'reset' itself overnight and not obviously as a result of any particular action.Desktop,appearance and the dock were reset as if I had just installed the OS.Thankfully all of my documents remained intact,and after resetting the above problems everything seemed OK again.However,now I cannot open either i-Tunes or Quicktime,they freeze before launching,and 'application not responding' is highlighted when I force quit.Quicktime,however still plays online content.
I have one drive with OS 9.2 on one partition and OS 10.3.9 on another.I have erased and reinstalled the OS 10.3.9 partition,and the problem still persists.
This is the first time I've used a site like this for a tech problem,and would really appreciate any advice or suggestions that may help.

Thankyou,

Tam.

[perfessor101]

There are several things that could have happened to cause the reset including a power drop out or spike. The real question is why Quicktime and iTunes are not working after an erase and install. Assuming you followed the normal procedure of running Software update after the reinstall to update all your applications to the latest version and repairing permissions, the first suspect on my list would be RAM.

Get the freeware utility Memtest or if you prefer the GUI version Rember and run it for a minimum of five complete test cycles to see if there are possible memory problems.

NOTE: depending on the speed of your Mac and how much RAM you have this can take several hours to complete -- you might start it before going to bed at night and hopefully it will complete by the time you get up the next morning.

[Tamagazzi]

Thanks to perfessor101 for taking the time to reply to my post.I forgot to mention that I ran software update after reinstalling the operating system,and this turned out to be the root of the problem.I trawled through many different posts on this site(and a few others),after joining macosx.com and posting my original thread,and found that many people had experienced problems with 10.3.9,and although I found no posts about media players like i-Tunes and Quicktime,I thought that it would be worth reinstalling Panther,but not upgrading to 10.3.9.I did this and everything is now working fine.From my experience 10.3.9 is rubbish-it caused irritating problems and gave me a headache.I advise anyone who is running 10.3.9 and having problems to reinstall their old OS,and anyone who is thinking of upgrading to avoid it.(you're probably all on Tiger now anyway-raaargh).