MacOS – 10.8 Notification Center occasionally freezes system

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My Mac Pro 5,1 sometimes freezes when I open the Notification Center, and it usually recovers by itself about 10 minutes later. I'd like to know why and how to fix it.
When this happens, the notification center will be half open, as shown in the screenshot. This happens about once a week, seemingly at random. Symptoms include:

  • Cmd-Tab does not work
  • Expose / Mission Control Spaces does not work.
  • Notification Center is frozen
  • Dock will not appear
  • I can't type text in any application
  • I can't drag to reposition windows on the screen
  • Cmd-Opt-Esc opens the Force Quit window, which functions properly
  • Spotlight works properly

Here is the Console's "all messages" log for a few minutes before and after the crash.
http://pastebin.com/NuGesUdy

screenshot
UPDATE: I've discovered two related things. When this problem happens, Activity Monitor shows Dock using about 100% CPU. Meanwhile, fseventer shows that the .db files in ~/Library/Application Support/Dock/ are being accessed constantly. Also, I think I've tracked down the culprit to the MySQL installation part of XAMPP. It turns out I can unfreeze the system every time by turning off MySQL. I'd still like to know why, and how to fix this.

Best Answer

From Apple Support Communities Thread:

  1. Restart your computer and hold down cmd + R to boot into recovery mode.
  2. From the menu bar, select Utilities -> Terminal
  3. Type in "resetpassword" without the quotes.
  4. In the window that pops up, there will be a button in the lower right corner labeled "Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs". Click on that. It will take a moment to complete.
  5. When it finishes, simply restart the computer from the Apple menu at the top right. Your computer will restart normally.
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