The computer had taken to restarting whenever it was nudged after having been put to sleep for more than a couple of hours. I noticed that each time it came back to life it did so with about a dozen open Finder windows—the same dozen, identically arrayed, which I closed en masse first thing before proceeding. Of course, one of the things the Mac OS does during a proper shutdown is to record the desktop state, so it belatedly occurred to me that whatever irregularity was causing the computer to swoon while unattended might be persisting, just like the undesired open windows, through each of these spontaneous startups. I accordingly conducted a full shutdown, whistled the first thirty seconds of the aria from "The Marriage of Not-Jenna Bush," powered up again, and...we're golden again for the past two days.

cordially,