Pro Tools falling apart. Need help

[marko_p]

It is super late, I am dead tired, and forgive my lack of focus and details. I'll come back tomorrow refreshed and focus.

What is the cleanest and most reliable way of reinstalling everything (OS, PT, audio interface)? Any version is fine, It is not that important to me anymore.

I am, well I was, running Pro Tools 12.5.1 for a while now on
13" rMBP 2015, the cheapest one (but still unreasonably expensive) with an
Apollo 16 thunderbolt (there are 2 more apollos but that is not important).
and this is what has been happening to me resently:

I closed PT normally and reopened after a couple of minutes and I got some kind of "cannot create workspace" error, which bizarrely was fixable (kinda) by removing the workspace file from within the Users/shared/avid? folder. The reliability of the "fix" kept dropping, the error kept coming back and moving the file was not fixing the problem anymore, which meant I was not actually fixing anything. At one point I stopped closing PT for days because I was on a tight schedule and working on multiple projects at a time so I couldn't afford the time to go through this. So I started updating everything in that new buggy, I am connecting and syncing forever app manager thingy and sometimes PT would start after that, sometimes it would not.
Googling didn't help, so I started to reverse reinstalling starting with PT.
So, I did a clean reinstall of PT, did not help. Then I updated to 10.11.6 to update PT to 12.5.2 and 12.6 and it showed some new error, some permission error 13. I could not be bothered so i went and Time Machined to a Back up of a clean 10.11.5 with nothing but audio driver, ilok and pt installed, which I know is a working setup. Now PT won't even get stuck. When i press the icon in the dock it jumps ones and it is like nothing ever happened after that.
iLok appears to function normally.

So, once again: Can you recommend me a "safe" software versions combo to start reinstalling everything from scratch?

Everything was working great for months (apart from the complementary -9173 error), and now I can't even get a "working" backup to work.

EDIT: Also, iLok reported a computer clock sync error at one point, but that thing sorted itself out

[huzzam]

Well, if you really want to start all over, you might as well roll back to Yosemite and 12.5.2. That still seems like the most stable combination to me. (Anyway the same instructions could also apply to El Capitan or Sierra, if you prefer.) So, get yourself an 8gb+ flash drive and proceed thusly:

1. back up everything with Time Machine (you seem to already be on this).
   1a. if you have another drive with enough space, also do a Carbon Copy clone of your drive, JUST IN CASE your time machine drive dies while your computer is erasing & reinstalling (carbon copy cloner is available here)
2. open the mac app store (in your apple menu, top left of the screen), find Yosemite in your "Purchases" tab, and download it.
3. follow the directions here to make a flash drive installer. the "easy" method is fine, with Diskmaker
4. restart holding the option key, and boot from the flash drive.
5. enter Disk Utility & erase your internal drive
6. quit disk utility, return to the installer and install yosemite
7. reboot & set up your mac. do NOT restore any data now. instead, once you're looking at your pristine desktop:
8. open time machine, navigate to your home folder, and restore necessary files.
9. open mac app store and check for & install any updates waiting for you
10. download pro tools 12.5.2 (or 11.3.2 or 12.6 if you prefer) & the air packages from your avid account, all your other drivers & plug-ins, and get busy installing.
11. rejoice. and do an immediate carbon copy clone of this new pristine system, so you always have a known good system you can use in emergencies.

hope that helps.
~peter in athens

[marko_p]

Done. Working 10.10.5 with 12.5.2.
I had 2 bootable USBs and a 3rd one with every version of PT available ready,

Thank you very much for the reply.

of topic:
I have had, on a couple of projects over the course of this sidestep into osx teritory (I came from windows), some sort of error when one the 4 bars (2core processor, without hyperthreading though) representing CPU usage in the System Usage window gets stuck.
Mostly, it happens after I reopen a closed project. The project boots into a buzz and then you switch buffer size and sometimes it unblocks, sometimes you have to disable some plugins and reopen the project and enable them and continue like that is normal procedure. But also I have managed to get it stuck with opening a version of LFOTool (Xfer records) that PT doesn't like mid project.
The strangest thing is that PT sometimes crashes from this CPU "overload" so hard you have to force quit and then when you reopen the quick start window doesn't show all the resent projects you worked on from the previous time you opened PT till it crashed. Sometimes you just have to lower the volume to not get crazy, and do some voodoo around the project and if you are lucky you are good to go in a couple of minutes.

What is this CPU error/bug called?
Is it a bug at all, or a way for avid to sort out the cheap f**ks like myself who bought a dual core i5 in 2016?