Huh. First of all, sorry for the assumption.

When you say it's aking for a login in safe mode, does it ask for the login with the normal mac os login screen? or with a plain-text prompt? anything else on screen during the boot sequence? (gray screen, blue screen, sad mac icon, question mark....)

Have you tried booting in verbose mode? Like single-user, but holding down the "v" instead of the "s" -- this may show you how far it's getting in the boot process before something fails.

Hmm... I don't have any real ideas yet, but I'll do some poking around when I get home in half an hour or so. Also, a general "yipes"!

Plain-text prompt.

Let's see, it goes gray apple with spinny thing, loading Mac OS X blue screen, black-screen with white text plain-text prompt for login.

If I boot up normally, it goes through all that and after a flash of the black-screen it goes to a blank blue screen that I can move the cursor around on with the mouse but otherwise does nothing.

I have not tried verbose mode, but I will in a moment!

Thanks very much, amych, it's fantastic to have something else to try and confirmation that this is bizarre.

OK, booting in verbose mode gets me a bunch of text that doesn't stick around long enough for me to make sense of it, then a blank blue screen, then the same console login screen that I get in "safe" mode, then a blank blue screen again (before I have a chance to log in), then a black screen with what looks like a block cursor in the upper left. It cycles back and forth between those last two.

I also tried putting it into Target mode and using my laptop to run Disk First Aid or whatever it's called on it. No problems found.

And my husband has found a corrupted Framework file and replaced it. That seems to have done the trick.

OK, I had to add the following function to as asp.net page:

Protected Overrides Sub Render(ByVal writer As System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter)


Response.ContentType = "application/ms-excel"
            Response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", "inline;filename=StandardReport.xls")
            DataList1.RenderControl(writer)

OK, I had to add the following function to as asp.net page:

Protected Overrides Sub Render(ByVal writer As System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter)


     Response.ContentType = "application/ms-excel"
     Response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", "inline;filename=StandardReport.xls")
      DataList1.RenderControl(writer)
end sub

This works fine (document opens as an excel spreasheet.) But now I want to modify the page to either output to excel or to regular html (using an if statement for the server-executed code). The problem is since my new subroutine overrides the Render function, I have to specify the content type and header for a normal http/html web page. I'm not sure what to use. So far I have this:

Response.ContentType = "text/html"
Response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", "what goes here")

I think the first one is correct, but I don't know about the second. Googling has failed me so far because everything I've found is about the non-html exceptions (pef, etc.) Any guesses as to what this should be?

eta: Or I suppose it's possible that the

Protected Overrides Sub Render

messes things up more for http/html and I'd have to do more to fix it, in which case I might just have to have two versions of the page.

eta² OK, I gave up and made two separate pages. Pro'lly a bad idea to tell the compiler, "OK, I want to override this function - no wait, I don't."

On my iBook G4, anytime I start up from a shut down, my skype auto-starts. How can I make it stop doing that?

Right-click the Skype icon in the dock and unselect "open at login." I can't tell you how many times I've accidentally ticked that box for something ridonkulous like Photoshop that I really DON'T need opening every time I turn on the computer.

yeah, it is unchecked there.