Really wierd behaviour with Mac OS 10.2.5

[willmac]

This is really wierd. I recently bought a second hand Powerbook G3 (Lombard) and installed Mac OS 10.2.5 plus all my apps etc. Everything was going fine until the following occurred. I finished surfing the net in Safari and quit. When I was back in the Finder I noticed that my desktop picture was gone. I logged out and in again and everything had reset to its default settings - the Finder, Web browsers, Terminal app etc. After a short investigation I found that most of the folders in my Library folder had gone (including the Preferences folder - hence the loss of settings). Unfortunately I panicked and didn't note down all of the folders that had vanished. I checked the system and crash logs, which reported nothing wierd. I booted from my Drive 10 rescue disk and performed a scan of my hard drive - all was fine. To try to sort this out I logged into my spare Admin account and copied over the folders to restore my settings. All was well until the exact same thing happenned again. But this time while I was surfing in Safari I encountered a dialogue box that instructed me to reboot at once using the reset button - was this a Kernel panic? I had no choice but to delete the account completely and rebuild my main admin account from scratch.

Well, any ideas? This was a really worrying occurrence yet extremely interesting. Nothing like this has ever happenned to me before.

willmac