My computer won't boot?!?!

Yesterday I rebooted my MacBook Pro. That sounds simple enough. I have verbose mode on at all times thanks to Cocktail so I normally watch all the output of the startup. Hey, i'm a geek, that's what geeks do. So everything looks fine and then OS X launches the login window app. All I get is a blue screen. No login box. This scares the shit out of me.

So now what? Lucie had a similar problem with her old Titanium Powerbook recently so I was accustomed to using the single user mode. There is a really good resource about single user mode here. First order of business, run fsck. Everything checks out fine. No errors on the hard drive. So now what? Well I tried every remedy I could find online, move the netinfo db out of the way, move the login window prefs out of the way, move network settings out of the way. None of that was working. Then suddenly it dawned on me. It must have been that piece of crap program I just installed last night! That's right, I had installed a program called DoubleCommand to remap the enter key on my keyboard to fn so that I could forward delete easily on my computer. That timesaver sure backfired on me. So in the end I just had to remove DoubleCommand from /Library/StartupItems, problem solved.

The moral of the story: If you install a program that runs on startup check to make sure it works when you install it. Not a few days later.