My system was already broken, and NOT by third party hacks... This was a legacy install issue. My "arrogance" was to try and piece together what went wrong. All the symptoms I was having were discussed heavily in the Apple forums and signs pointed to the various combination of ACLs, sticky-bits, umasks, use of chmod, chown, group assignments, and more. The bulk of the problems came down to a lack of appropriate access to temporary directories. The only problem that hadn't found detailed resolution was the failure of the GUI Software Update, with the -3001 network error, and a silent printing error that I hadn't seen discussed. At some point, I'm guessing 10.5.2, or an adjacent security update, I was removed from group wheel, which my admin account had been part of since it's initial install under 10.2 (my PB G4 shipped with 10.2 installed, and 10.3 update disks.). After I put myself back, I could again indulge in luxuries like running Software Update, or Printing. From there it was a pretty straightforward step to recognize the failure chain. I was functional, and I also knew I was in an unstable, undesirable state.

I made no attempt to declare this a sweeping panacea, or that I knew better than Apple. I included caveats, and noted the incompleteness of the solution and that it was both a "possible", not a definite or Definitive fix. See a later comment for updates on a more complete, more "Apple" solution.

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