mail/keyboard failures with G4ibook/10.3+10.4

[lbhammond]

Hello.
my G4iBook/os10.3.3 began keyboard symptoms while in the mail program last
10/05.
These were first: no response to the "reply","reply all" both in the mail window
and in the main mail tool bar. "forward" and others seemed ok.
Then the keyboard started to not respond to "delete", then typing would decrease
and finally not accept more that one letter to a line. Ultimately, the "send"key
won't respond. Ultimately, the keyboard symptoms migrate into "apple works and
text-edit".
I have had the apple store people do software repairs and hardware checks and
clean reinstalls and archive installs and then
give me a brand new G4 iBook with os 10.4 and all the updates. and then the
symptoms reappeared on the new machine that night!?.
and the apple store people went thru it all again but tried different things,
including trashing and rebuilding the mail plist and tried trashing my
administrator accounts and rebuilding and trying with their personal accounts in
my programs, andever kind of custom reinstall for mail.....and everything they
could think of.
At least twice during all of these attempts, apple used their hardrives to
backup my info: one of these times they unknowingly used a corrupt hard drive!
The other times they used my backup for the data transfer.
The software and applications I have and use are not advanced: iphoto, itunes,
mail, epson perifreals, palm handheld, adobe photoshop elements.

The things I have tried to keep saved to my desktop are: my desk top text files
and the updated Quicken 14.0.2 data files.

I cannot give you an exact play by play nor have I been given every repair
report as apple did not generate a customer copy each time.

I currently cannot use my mail program. I was told at the apple store, that now
they don't know what it could be and that I will have to send it to cupertino
for repair.
I don't know what to do.
Please help me.--
Lb.Hammond

[mecparis75]

Hello,

I found your message when searching for help with the same problem. I have had a G4 iBook running 10.4 for about a year, when it suddenly began displaying the same symptoms. First the Send function wouldn't work, then I couldn't enter text, etc. All this happened in the space of a week or less. Nothing helped, including repairing the permissions, etc.

Then I remembered that I had recently used the G4 to store the contents of my wife's G3 iBook (running OS9), while I installed OSX. I transferred the files back to the reformatted machine, but left a copy of her hard disk on my G4. Since I had done a complete transfer of the entire contents of her machine, these files included an OSX application folder (including Mail) and other OSX files (all of them probably 10.1). When I deleted these files, the problem went away immediately.

I don't know if this helps, but it's clear that there was some sort of conflict with some older version of an OSX file or application.

Good luck with your problem,

mecparis75