The saga continues . . .
Oy, this is so annoying. I’ve lost about two days worth of working. I finally made it down to the Apple Store and they confirmed a couple of things:
1) my battery was not giving adequate power output, and
2) my filesystem was pretty corrupt
The general consensus is that FileVault is bad. The guy at the Genius Bar basically said that since the property files need to be read from the system and decrypted (perhaps even partially), the files sit in a weird state. So when complete crashes occur FileVault cannot write the encrypted files back to disk thereby corrupting them. What exacerbated this problem was that my faulty battery would cause the computer to shut down spontaneously without allowing FileVault to clean up. So the advice was to remove FileVault. There’s only one problem: I have a huge amount of data in my user directory.
The solution to this was not a pretty one: copy the entire user directory out to an external hard disk, Erase And Install the Mac OS back onto the drive, and reinstall all settings from there. This has caused a whole ripple effect. I spent probably 3 hours backing up my data, 1.5 hours reinstalling Mac OS, and 45 minutes patching it back up. Now comes the really painful part: copying all of the data I backed up back to the proper places. Oh, and I still have to reinstall everything.