So this site is turning into a Tiger blog so far. Well, what can I say? It is my latest obsession. I don't know why really. But here's another discovery:
I have a few builds of Tiger. One is on my Powerbook, and it's running just swell. I have a couple others on firewire drives, for testing and breaking. But it seems that simply having Tiger on a firewire drive can be enough to cause problems in and of itself. This may be due to the fact that I am shuffling this drive around from computer to computer. Tiger gets confused. "Where am I now?" it says.
Actually, it never says this. It never complains at all, really. It just starts acting funny. The first symptom was that my firewire Tiger install stopped searching for anything in my home account. I could search the drive that housed my home account and get accurate results. But searching "Home" resulted in nothing. Zilch. Nada. My latest glitch was that dragging files onto applications in the Dock stopped working. The app wouldn't highlight, and the file would not open in said app.
Fortunately, I seem to have found, quite by accident (a story I won't bore you with), the apparent cure-all for these apparently firewire related Tiger snafus: clear the cache. Particularly /Library/Caches. You can rename it or just delete it, but getting rid of these cache files fixed both of the aforementioned problems. And BTW, a reboot is required for the cache deletions to take effect. Just so you know.