Bounce, Bounce, Quit! :(

I've been experiencing this for two days now and I've run out of ideas...

Some applications, when launched, will bounce a couple of times in the dock then quit.

I had tried everything from Repairing permissions with Disk Utility, Disk Utility reports my Hard Drive's S.M.A.R.T. status to be fine, I've manually chown and chmod'ed the Applications to match the ones that did run, I'v run Yasu, fsck, and finally out of frustration backed up, reinitializing my hard drive, and installing Panther fresh.

Reinitializing and a installing a fresh copy of Panther helped as the number of applications failing to run have been reduced from most of all of them, to only Quicktime as far as I've been able to find so far.

But, what gives??? Better yet, how can I fix this? I've completly run out of ideas!

The only other thing I can think of - is take it to Apple.

what applications are they? this might help as someone else might have had the same problem

the only time iv had this problem was when you get ridf of the main source of the program i.e. trashing the original location..it'll bounce then just quit or tell you that it cannot find the source of the application..

Right now, it's only happening to Quicktime that I've noticed.
But before I redid my hard drive, it was basically just about everything, such as (IIRC) :

Safari, Firefox, iTunes, iCal, Transmit, SubEthaEdit, Yasu... don't remember what else.

Funny thing was, I still had the .dmg for Yasu, I was able to mount it and run it from there.

I had made no changes whatsoever to my Mac from when everything worked - except to install my new iPod Shuffle.
And since I redid my hard drive - my iPod Shuffle has not touched my Mac. So that's not it.

Well, since this time around it was only happening to Quicktime, I downloaded a fresh copy from apple and it fixed me up.

That was weird tho.

I'll assume everything is fine now. But if it acts up again - it's straight to the apple store and see what they have to say.

If an application crashes on opening, the best thing to do is take a look at the console log. Applications/Utilities/Console.app
Most likely, you'll see a crash report generated. In that case, its typically an application specific issue.

Funny thing is, they where not generating such reports.

It was really weird.

All is well now.