Beachball of death

[Timothy Miller]

I refer to Macintosh OS X. When that rainbow colored beachball spins 
and spins and you can't stop it with the usual methods 
(command-period, clear pending messages, etc.), you're probably going 
to have to force-quit.

I have a wonderful Rev consultant who helps me with stuff like this, 
but he/she won't be available for a couple of days, I'm leaving on 
vacation tomorrow, and I'm worried, gravely inconvenienced and 
somewhat financially impoverished because of this problem. Actually, 
I can't afford the vacation because of it! So I thought I'd try to 
get a clue from you-all, first -- maybe I'll worry less on vacation. 
Maybe more...

I have one stack that has spawned the Satanic Beachball on rare 
occasions. Today, it started doing it more often, until it became 
unusable. If there is a pattern to it, I can't find it. Sometimes 
inserting the cursor in a field will do it. Sometimes just moving to 
another page in the same background, or just bringing that stack 
window to the front. Sometimes the error message window seems to open 
around the same time, sometimes not.

Lately, things got worse. Like I open the stack, I get empty error 
messages, or an unresponsive error window, I can't edit the stack 
script, or background script, or I can edit it, but then I can't save 
and close the script. I try to edit one script, but then another 
script pops open instead. I tried to trace the bg script, and it 
actually froze the debugger! When The Beachball spins, I can move to 
the finder, use other applications, and so on, but Rev is either 
unresponsive, or responds erratically. Sometimes there's an 
unresponsive "do you want to save your changes?" dialog box. At other 
time the glowing red "close" button is unresponsive, though I can 
always minimize with the yellow button, or bring the window back from 
the dock. At times I somehow manage to close all the stacks, by 
clicking around somewhat randomly, but Rev still won't quit. Rev 
continues to use about 30% of the CPU's capacity at these times.

If I suppress messages before I open the same stack, the stack seems 
to work the way I'd expect to work if messages are suppressed. No 
apparent problems.

Does this sound like a well-known syndrome? Corrupted stack? 
Reinstall Rev? Serious script error? Rev bug? (DiskWarrior says the 
hard disk is fine.) I'm on 2.5.1 for OS 10.3.9. A G4 machine with 
more than enough physical RAM. The machine is quite stable in every 
other respect.

If it's a corrupted stack, is there a utility stack that reconstructs 
corrupted stacks? Where do I find it?

Thanks in advance,

Tim