Blue Screen of Logout

A while ago, I had an interesting thing happen to me that in all my years of using a Mac I had never seen before. I got a Blue Screen of Death or rather in this particular instance, a Blue Screen of Logout (BSOL), as it kicked me off the computer, closed all of my applications and left me at the logon screen.

At the time it happened, I was working in Scrivener and the old install of my mac, believing it to be an issue with the OS along with many others I was having at the time, I just took it as a reason to re-install my mac, which as you know from my earlier posts, was exactly what I did.

So now here I am on my shiny reinstalled Mac, hardly any apps on now (they have to earn their way back onto the hard drive now) and only a few things running in the background (Dropbox, Knox, TextExpander, Alarms), typing in Scrivener when I get another BSOL.

Luckily as Scrivener is backing up and saving often, I lost one sentence worth of work, so now big deal but still this worried me. Initially I checked with the developer if something like this could be caused by Scrivener and he was kind enough to respond to me and suggest what he thought could be the cause.

Digging into the console log, I found out that was that a process called WindowServer was crashing and every time it did, I got logged out;

Process:         WindowServer [70]

Path:            /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/

CoreGraphics.framework/Versions/A/Resources/WindowServer

Identifier:      WindowServer

Version:         ??? (???)

Code Type:       X86-64 (Native)

Parent Process:  launchd [1]

Date/Time:       2011-02-21 14:35:01.463 +0100

OS Version:      Mac OS X 10.6.6 (10J567)

Report Version:  6

Anonymous UUID:                      031DDB6D-9688-4F83-9E33-19ECBB9364FF

Exception Type:  EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)

Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0xffffffff1f254e98

Crashed Thread:  0  Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Process:         WindowServer [70]Path:            /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/

CoreGraphics.framework/Versions/A/Resources/WindowServerIdentifier:      WindowServerVersion:         ??? (???)Code Type:       X86-64 (Native)Parent Process:  launchd [1]
Date/Time:       2011-02-21 14:35:01.463 +0100OS Version:      Mac OS X 10.6.6 (10J567)Report Version:  6
Anonymous UUID:                      041DDB6D-9677-4F83-9E33-19ECBB9364FF
Exception Type:  EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0xffffffff1f254e98Crashed Thread:  0  Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

I first tried to resolve it by restarting in Single User Mode and running AppleJack and then going through and performing the disk and permission repairs but afterwards when it was done and I rebooted into the system, I still had the same problem :(

So I then booted into safe mode (switch the computer off, switch it on and hold Shift down until the Apple logo appears), then I went into Disk Utility and verified and repaired permissions. Now I don't want to get too excited but it seems to have helped and the WindowServer errors have disappeared from the console, so now I just need to keep an eye on it for the next couple of days and see what happens.