Just to make sure I have this right, both steps 1 & 2 are in the new user account.
If I’m reading you correctly, it looks like you had some initial booting problem in step one.
Questions:
Were you still booting into your old User Account, then switching to the new User Account?
or
Were you booting directly into the new User Account?
I want to make sure your computer isn’t even touching your old user account when your computer boots up. We know there’s a problem there, even though we really don’t know what it is yet.
In System Preferences -> User Accounts? (Don’t remember what’s it’s called on Maverick). Change Login Option to directly boot into your new User Account.
Continue using RW doing all kinds of things, saving a few times, rebooting now and then. Don’t worry about Verbose mode unless booting into your new User Account fails.
The themes and plugins and stacks you use shouldn’t make any difference. RW is operating in it’s own sandbox. Shouldn’t be affecting anything else, especially the OS. An app really shouldn’t be able to affect the OS and stop it from booting. That’s the theory I believe.
Side question:
Horror stories about Yosemite? There’s been enough updates to it now that any horror issues should be long gone. I never saw any, but that’s me.
By the way, I reboot on average about once a month, maybe.
1 - In System Prefs (Users & Groups) I changed login option to automatically start into my new account;
2 - Restarted, opened RW, created one additional fake page, saved, exported to disk and quit RW.
3 - Restarted – no problem;
4 - Reverted the System Pref from step 1 to normal, that is, automatic login OFF;
5 - Repeated everything from step 2;
6 - Restarted – no problem.
That showed me that the login mode (auto or OFF) has no bearing on my problem. Also, it showed me that working in my new user account does not reproduce my problem from the old user account. That is great, but I still have to go back to my old account and try to fix it. My other option would be to use my new account for one purpose only: RapidWeaver, and my old account for everything else. Forget about fixing anything. That would be, perhaps, easier, but it would also mean a defeat. I want to have my old account working for everything, including RW.
Turning back to my Verbose screenshots, I see in the last line a record of cleaning up orphaned/unlinked files and directories. I think that’s the clue we should concentrate on, because those are most likely remnants of an old RW installation(s). So, the question is: how to get rid of them permanently?
I will now go back to my old account and keep experimenting.
I’ve been trying to track down what suggests these are old RW installations… Any insight would be appreciated. Have you booted into your recovery partition and repaired the HD (note: not the permissions)?
What makes me think that those are RW remnants is the fact that no other application on my computer causes this startup problem and the Verbose startup mode stalls at the point where it cleans up orphaned/unlinked files and directories. Isn’t it safe to connect those two facts?
If you’re able to diagnose this further, with any diagnostics that list the files, that would be the best way to determine the cause. Until then, it’s coincidence (and I’d be saying the same even for a third-party app, not RapidWeaver).
Here’s my thoughts, for whatever they might be worth.
– You now know you have a problem with your old User Account.
– At this point no one knows where the problem lies. We’re all guessing at this point.
– You’ve had this problem for a while, even transferring it to a new computer.
– This is your second plea for help. No real fix has presented itself.
– The only new thing discovered is you now know it’s in your old User Account, not the OS.
To me this now looks like a time issue. How much time are you willing to spent to figure out, in the thousands upon thousands files, a great many of them hidden, which file(s) are corrupted. You could spend days and days getting to the bottom of this, and maybe still not find the problem.
The flip side is this. You can simply continue to run your apps in the new User Account, re-applying passwords, setting preferences, etc. Yes it will take a while, but when you’re finished, you’ll have a very clean User Account, and it works right now.
@1335Days – You are right. It would be extremely time consuming or extremely lucky to find the specific culprit for this problem.
I established that the new project I started (re-creation of my real-life project) in my old account, now takes only about 4 minutes to re-boot my computer. That is still a nuisance, but I can live with it. So, I will have to decide whether to keep using my old account for everything, or for everything minus RapidWeaver. And (nothing else, but) RW could be used in my new account. Perhaps, when the time comes for OS upgrade (El Capitan), I will dump my old account and start anew…
Both options have pluses and minuses. But this situation is better than it used to be before we started this experiment. So, I want to thank you all for your willingness to help and for some real guidance. I consider this thread as closed.