I recently managed to mess up my Mac mini while resetting PRAM and NVRAM. I did reset them indeed but something got corrupted because the mini would hang at the blue screen with the spinning beach ball re-appearing time and time again. Strangely I could still connect to it with SSH and file sharing worked, too.
I tried lots of things such as resetting the System Management Controller (SMC) and booting from the Snow Leopard install DVD to verify and fix permissions/disk.
Login Window Started Security Agent Login Window - Returned from Security Agent AuthorizationRef returned errAuthorizationDenied. Exiting.
The post mentions a "corrupted authorization file" but that didn't help me much (where is this file?). Googleing for that lead me to a blog entry labeled "LoginWindow crash" which explains things quite detailed. A second hint came from the insanelymac.com forum, thanks.
Thank you for this info, it helped me solve the same problem!
Thanks! This info saved me, too.
IT WORKS!!! THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!!
I lost 2 hours to resolve that problem before I found this post.
I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you so much for this information! It really helped me out a lot. While actually finding an operating system that would both mount my OS X HDD as writeable and also show all files was a huge pain, your information was 100% spot-on, and I cannot thank you enough for the help that you provided. My Snow Leopard installation now boots successfully again.