
Okay, Chimera has rather suddenly gone unstable on me. I can fully appreciate that it might be something that I've done, but I'd like some help getting it usable again. I've seen two different behaviors now. The first is that when I load a pdb file of a calcite crystal, then try to rotate the crystal... boom. Chimera crashes and everything is gone. I'm not sure if this has to do with this one file or not. In an attempt to figure that out, I relaunched Chimera and started opening files, one at a time. The first file, a small NaCl crystal, opened just fine. I could rotate it, etc. I closed it, and opened a file with graphite in it. Same thing, everything was fine. Next I opened a diamond file. This turns out to have been a big mistake. When I tried to open the diamond file, everything froze. I couldn't close any of the Chimera windows or pallets. None of the menus would respond. After waiting for a little bit, I quit X11. This successfully shut Chimera down, but there's now a new problem. When I quit X11, the Chimera icon stayed in my dock. Right clicking on it brings up the contextual menu saying that the application is not responding, but choosing 'Quit' from this menu does nothing, and Chimera doesn't show up in the Force Quit dialog. To top it all off, relaunching X11, and then double clicking on Chimera (the application, not the dock icon) does nothing. Chimera seems to be down for the count. I haven't yet tried a command-line 'kill process', or restarting. The only two major changes/additions that I've made to my computer recently are updating to Mac OS X 10.2.5, and installing Fink. On a rather unrelated note, Chimera behaves very strangely if you Hide X11 while Chimera is running. All of the pallets simply have their title bars vanish, making it very difficult to work with them. I've gotten past this by using multiple desktops, but being able to hide an application while working in another is a valuable feature, and I'd like to see the proper functionality established, if that's possible. Geoff.