Unexplained .DS_Store files are still being created. I restarted, did a find, and found 80 new .DS_Store files in the tree that I have been looking at. Could mdsync or backupd do this?

It is looking now that deleting a .DS_Store file is unreliable. This is what I did: find . -name .DS_Store -print ; find . -name .DS_Store -exec rm {} \; ; find . -name .DS_Store -print The first print statement listed 16 files. The second print statement listed 8 files. That means 8 files were deleted and 8 were not. Hmm... I repeated the deletion step and 4 of the 8 remaining files were deleted. It seems that every other file is deleted???

I have started tracking the memory usage of the WindowServer process. In a freshly restarted system with no desktop applications other than Activity Monitor, the memory usage (as reported by Activity Monitor) is about 130 MB. Right now it is 775 MB, which is getting close to the territory where things start to hang. As applications are started and exited, the memory usage goes up and down. However, I have observed (using a script that logs the memory usage every minute) that when the system exits display sleep there can be an "instantaneous" jump in the memory usage of 100 MB or more. This additional memory usage is never reverted. By the way, I am using an Intel based iMac.

The result of not using the suspect application is that the problem did not go away, although it took longer for the problem to occur (about 5 days instead of the usual 1 or 2 days). So, the application is not the cause of the problem, but it may perform more of the operations that trigger the problem.