I got home, inserted the disk, started the install and had ~45 minutes to wait until my shiny new OS was up and running and finally my lagging MacBook Pro would be 64-bit. I run a Windows 7 machine at home in 64-bit and have a big Dell Precision T5500 64-bit Ubuntu machine at work, so I know the benefits of 64-bit and couldn’t wait to get my favorite OS, OS X up to speed.

The install went without a hitch — the computer rebooted, asked me to log in, and I got the welcome video and a registration pop-up. If it were Microsoft, I wouldn’t (and don’t) register. But Apple seems nicer, so I went ahead and did the registration. I finished up, hit submit, and I got the gay pride spinning wheel of death.

I let this sit for about 20 mins, though maybe Apple’s line was down or something… Nothing. Turned off the laptop, restarted. Got a log-in screen, typed in my info and all I got was the Apple outer space graphic. No dock, no menu, just my mouse pointer and that’s it. OK, turn it off, pull the battery this time, let it sit for a minute and think about what its done as life drains from its capacitors, reboot — Same outer space nothingness.

OK, time to call Apple Tech support, something I dread! I placed the call, pressed 1 for Snow Leopard support and had a person immediately. A nice person who sounded like a native English speaker even! After detailing the issues, the tech had me shut it down, then start it up holding down the C key. Once booted we went into the Disk Utility and repaired permission. This took a few minutes and there were a few printer drivers repaired. Reboot, try a normal login — Same outer space nothingness.

Next we tried booting in safe mode (hold down shift while booting) and first we checked the startup items. There were some things like Adium, Google Notifier, and a few I don’t recall that we deleted. There were also 2 items which I could not remove, a smb mount to a network share at work and MCXMenuExtraTool. We left iTunes helper. See the screenshot — blurred the smb path for security, but you can see that the remove button is grayed out for both the smb mount and MCXMenuExtraTool. I will note here that I can right click on the smb item and get a “reveal in finder” but nothing happens when I do that. If I reveal the MCXMenuExtraTool finder opens up in the directory where that ap sits.

So, after removing all my startup items except for what you see above, we tried to boot — Same outer space nothingness.

Rebooted into safe mode, then dragged /home/System/Library/Caches to the trash. Reboot … Same outer space nothingness. Back into safe mode, opened the system profiler and sent my profile to Apple. The tech put me on hold for a few minutes while reviewing this file, then came back on and basically told my my kernel was all screwed up and not properly loading.

So, at this point he told me to simply try to reinstall by booting while holding C then going through the standard install process again. That took about 45 minutes so he gave me a case # and said to call back if it didn’t work. I went and had dinner, came back and had a login screen. I put in my info — Same outer space nothingness.

Called Apple back, gave them my case number (again, no holding to get a tech, got straight in, kudos to Apple!) and caught my new tech up on all that had been done. The next thing to try was clearing the PRAM by rebooting and holding down Command-Option-P-R keys and waiting to hear to boot sound twice. Logged in — Same outer space nothingness.

Ok, at this point everyone is baffled. Apple can’t believe what they are seeing. So the tech tells me to backup my home directory, wipe my drive and start over from scratch. He was very helpful in detailing this process, even emailed me a couple documents on the subject and gave me his direct line to call him back if I had any problems. We hung up — all in all, about 3 hours on the phone with Apple.

Now, at this point I was basically told there is no hope for me. But I wasn’t ready to accept that. I thought perhaps that smb login item was the culprit, so at 11PM I took my laptop into work, plugged into the network and tried to boot there. My hope was this smb would find its target and we’d boot normally. Unfortunately — Same outer space nothingness.

As I drove home contemplating doing the whole backup/wipe/rebuild process (something that sounded a little voodooish to me since it would likely just restore whatever it was that was causing the original problem), I thought about what smb is doing… smb is simply a way to mount a network drive — in other words make my mac see a hard drive over the network as if it was physically plugged in. The key word is network. I noted that when I did a safeboot, my airport was automatically connecting to my home wireless network. What if I turned it off?

So I did just that — booted in safe mode and turned off airport. I then rebooted, put in my login info and it fired right up!! There was my usual desktop background and icons, dock — all there! Apple’s Welcome video played, but this time I declined to register.

Next, I held my breath and turned airport back on. Smooth as could be, found my wifi and here I am.

What was learned? Not really sure. Somehow my IT department put in an auto smb login into my login items which I can’t remove. They came around a few weeks ago and “bound” my laptop to the domain. However, even as an administrator of my computer I cannot remove this smb login item. I have yet to try rebooting now with wifi on, but I am 99.9% sure if airport is on it will give me the same outer space nothingness.

So — any ideas or solutions are greatly appreciated. Please leave a comment below and I will post any updates or more permanent solutions that I find.

Final note: I have found 2 other problems with Snow Leopard that I might as well share since you’re here.

UPDATE 1: VPN is working! I just deleted the old ap, download a new one & installed, and it works! YES. Details on apple forum: http://bit.ly/36yis

UPDATE 2: After getting VPN working and considering fl0′s comment below, after fixing VPN I tried a reboot while leaving airport on. Holy shit, it works!! I am back in business!

www.flickr.com/photos/burnflare/2387682004/

I thought that was awesome, and had to try it. I selected all the applications in my aps folder and let er rip (well, I didn’t fire up Paralles and let windows pollute things). Only took about 5 minutes to load everything. I had 144 processes running after all was said and done — and memory to spare!!!!!

Here is the screenshot, I posted on Flickr. Click the image to see the full size if you can’t believe what you are seeing…