cocoaforge

I haven't read the other page, but are the errors there gone if you try another user account?

Yes, they are gone in another user so it is something to do with me - and something that an archive and install did not cure.

I really don't want to reinstall from scratch becuase I've done that before (back at OSX.3.n) and it's a real pain in the fundament when I have a slot-loading CD only drive (no DVD drive - I don't watch films, video etc so it seems a pointless expense) and a USB 1 connection to a non-bootable external drive!

I'd try narrowing it down to a specific subfolder of ~/Library, since that's where the problem must lie if you're not seeing it on another user. Nothing in ~/Library should be necessary for your system to work (though some apps of course will not do properly).

I don't think we need to reload os x to fix this.

I wonder if we could find the culprit with something like fs_usage.