More Mac woes

Ok, I've had pretty good luck with my home computing environment since switching to an all Apple network. I had a fairly extreme issue yesterday though:

[jamesh@gordon:~]# open /Applications/Vine\ Server.app/
LSOpenURLsWithRole() failed with error -10810
[jamesh@gordon:~]# open Desktop/
LSOpenURLsWithRole() failed with error -10810

And stuff like this in the /var/log/system.log:

Nov 10 10:14:10 gordon com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[206]: Background: sshd[99144].subset.272: Bug: launchd_core_logic.c:8686 (23932):0
Nov 10 10:14:10 gordon com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[206]: Background: sshd[99144].subset.272: job_mig_spawn() can't find its session!
Nov 10 10:14:10 gordon open[99155]: spawn_via_launchd() failed, errno=5 label=[0x0-0x1237236].OSXvnc path=/Applications/Vine Server.app/Contents/MacOS/Vine Server flags=1

Yikes. Also, I was having problems with stuff like my squid proxy, stunnel sessions, etc. I could launch stuff from the GUI, but it seemed like the command line was pretty much hosed. This began as 10.6.1, and an upgrade to 10.6.2 did not resolve anything. Naturally, there were multiple reboots which also did nothing. Extensive googling gave me a couple of leads:

- rebuilding the LaunchServices database:

/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/\
Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister \
-r -f -v -kill -seed local, system, user

Sadly, this also spit back a bunch of -10810 errors, and helped nothing. This is the corrected syntax - the invocation on a number of websites did not work properly on Snow Leopard.

- Fork Bomb

Other sites mentioned that there was a problem and suggested looking for a fork bomb using dtrace. This also proved fruitless.

==> The solution <==

All I had to do to fix this was to boot from the install media and run a repair disk. Looks like this was a filesystem problem in the end. I've got to say though, the OS really shouldn't throw "unknown" errors for something like this.