long shot
 

This is a long shot, but could you please try restarting without any CDs in the drive?
Because of where the 'pbs' process is crashing, I suspect a possible problem with CDs that have colons (:) in their names.

Super Sleuth if True anyway......
 

There are two Archive and Install Options
There are two Archive and Install Options, with and with out saving Apps and Users Prefs.

They both Take Your OSX Folder the ("System") Folder and Make it into a Previous one.

If you choose to Save your Settings It will Save you from user setup where you assign passwords, It will save you from having to Drag things from your Applcaitons Folder to your new one, It will preserve your Desktop, Your Dock etc.

You will have to recreate printers and repatch the OS back to 10.26 etc. and counting, reinstall any custom drivers e.g. Carbon Copy Cloner, If you have any special non apple mice etc. You will have to reinstall Palm to make HotSync work correctly, but your data will still be there.

It is super fast compared to not saving your user settings.

As always it would be irresponsible if did not tell you to back up your data "just in case" somthing unlikely happend or human error like you do a Format install etc.

I had dozens of Applications work with Zero modification. And a few that required reinstall to work correctly. What ever X11 Installs in the Applications Folder will be preserved. That Said I do no use X11 ** I suspect stongly what ever hooks it puts into the system will be terminated e.g. if it puts anything in Startup actions or the actual system folder.

Hayne, I tried rebooting on numerous occasions without and CDs in the drive but without success.

Anthlover, thanks a lot for the info on Archive and Install.

cheers to you all,
at

I've just done an archive and reinstall and the problem remains. :-((

Any other suggestions?

I'm perplexed. Running the process monitor the pbs process still comes up as zombie and the copy and paste problem remains the same.

can you show us the results of the shell command:

and:

[edit: readability -mt] [which failed]

troubleshooting
 

Ok, lets go slowly and figure this thing out.
Let's start with standard troubleshooting procedures.
1) Does the problem occur when you log in as a different (preferably freshly created) user?
2) Does the problem occur when you remove all third-party hardware (e.g. mice, speakers, printers, etc)?
3) Does the problem occur when you remove all third-party software that modifies system-wide functionality (e.g. Unsanity haxies, menubar additions, etc)?
4) Does the problem occur when you restart holding down the Shift key ("Safe boot")?
5) Does the problem occur if you disable all login items (software that runs at login) and startup items that you have installed (e.g. databases, etc)?
6) Does the problem occur if you disable all Sharing (via the System Preferences panel)?
7) Does the problem occur if you disconnect your machine from the network and restart (after disabling any connect-at-startup software)?
8) Does the problem correlate with use of a particular application? Restart, run that one application, check if problem occurs. Quit that application, start another, check if probelm occurs, ... You will obviously have Finder running as well, but the idea is to have your machine as minimal as possible.

In your particular case, the issue seems to be that 'pbs' is dying for some reason, so you don't need to check if you can do copy & paste - just check if 'pbs' is running (with Process Viewer or 'ps' in Terminal).

regrets. i forget you are copy/paste challenged.

would you consider creating an account that we could remote ssh into to examine some things?

Wow weirder still When you ran Archive and Install did you save user settings
 

Wow weirder still When you ran Archive and Install did you save user settings???
---------------------------------------------------------------
Did you try copy and paste before Patching to 10.26 and such.....
------------------------------------------------

You may have do the more Violent: Do not Save user Settings Archive and Install.

------------------------------------------------

You will have to personally move things from the Previous System folder Desktop and Applications folder, Redrag things to the Doc etc. Some Apps insert Crap into the System and user folders, those Apps will require a reinstall e.g. Photoshop 7, but not office
-----------------------------------------------

A really Virgin Archive Has to solve your problem as it is close you can come to Formatting your drive and starting over with out actually doing so.
---------------------------------------------

This is good time any any to ask if you have external firewire drive or similar that you can use with Carbon Copy Cloner to not only make mirror image backups, but to allow to make multiple different clones of your system.....

You can merely make multiple back ups (bootable) (read historical with all your apps and data) with different snapshot lags to allow you to roll back to different time frames or you can have a main Back up clone and one you use for trying out all the hacks and crap with out fear, and of course one of the Paritions can be for Data only if you want too.
-----------------------------------------

I wanted to point out that the two basic methodologies here:

1) Trying to unscramble your system conflict or corruption OR
2) Archive and install are at there heart the same thing takeling the problem though from opposite ends. They both work: Almost 100 percent of the time, ****from Scratch is the faster repair methodology. And as admins we are so busy we always want speed. You litterally can futz for days.

******************** And yet you have a very generous benifactor whom wants to help you uncover the root cause so

***************************as to allow you and others avoid it in the future.

If a problem is time critical and you have access to that firewire Drive or an extra drive in your system (i forgot which cpu) **********you can actually conduct both methodologies. Clone your system, as you should have been backing up anyway.

Then on the Cloned version of the system you can try to find the root cause and on your Virginized system you can get back to work.

Good Luck

first understand, then act
 

Even if your system is really screwed up (as is possibly the case here), it is always a better idea to understand what caused the problem before you reinstall. Otherwise there is a lilkelihood that the problem will reoccur. Many problems are due to something (hardware or software) that the user has installed on the system and so a reinstall of the system followed by a reinstall of all the other stuff that was there before will just reintroduce the problem.

ps wwax1 etc
Produces no response at all

-------
-I set up a fresh test account and the problem recurs
-I turned off sharing and problem recurs
-There is no thrid party hardware that could be attached so that can't be the root of it.
- The problem occurs irrespective of whether I'm connected to a network or not
- I've disable my lanuch at start up items and it still occurs
- the problem is there from the beginning and the only applications that allows me to cut and paste is Quark (text) and photoshop (graphics). I assume this si because they have their own clipboards. Is it possible for them to clash with PBS?

------
anyway I'll do the rest of the checks more carefully later but am feeling a bit aggravated now, so it's time to go and have a swim and relax. :-)

applications
 

It is theoretically possible (although unlikely) for their own clipboards to cause pbs to crash. But since you said the problem is there from the beginning, I assume that it has nothing to do with those apps since they were not running when the problem occurs (after a restart of your machine).

P.S. When you go through the list of things to check, it would be good if you reported exactly what you did so we can understand the situation more precisely. E.g. "I disabled my Startup Items by going into the folder XXX and doing YYY and then I restarted the machine. Immediately after restart (when the only app running was Finder), I checked 'pbs' by using Process Viewer and it was listed there as a zombie."

At least you have a Pool, I live on a concrete Jungle known as Manhattan
 

At least you have a Pool, I live on a concrete Jungle known as Manhattan

the letter l (ell), not the number one (1)

in the crash logs you sent, there's this business about filesystempaths...
wonder if there are some funny chars in your paths.

could you rename the drive partitions to something very plain like blue, and green?

hayne, i do believe that quark and PS roll their own clipboards. they also probably attempt to post to pbs. i wonder if there are any interesting PS/quark messages to examine in the logs.

funny characters
 

Yes - good idea. But before you try renaming your hard drives (or drive partitions), tell us what they are currently named. Do they have any non-ASCII characters in their names? What about the names of the folders that you are working in? Do they have any non-ASCII characters in their names?

Yes - but he said that the problem occurs before he runs Quark or PhotoShop.

I realise that the above is difficult to read but doesn't it indicate that at's boot drive is 98% full and the secondary drive (Powerbook G4 Software) is 99% full? I would have thought that such a radically small amount of free space could well be the culprit here. If not, it certainly wont be helping matters.

good eye, dave.

Ok, now that's confirmed :D

at, you need to free up some space on your boot drive. There was a thread discussing this recently but I got a little lost in the technicalities so ... I'll leave Merv to suggest how much space you should free up.

disk space
 

Good point.
The boot drive seems to have about 650 MB available. (Or 900 MB if you include the 250 MB that the system is reserving for emergencies.)
This is indeed minimal and might cause problems. Although I wouldn't expect to see problems right after startup, before doing anything that might use swap space.
Still, it might be a good idea to try to clean up and make a bit more space available.