That's very strange. What I see is that either the apps work, or they don't work at all. I haven't seen any corruption of the installed setup, save for my initial forays into applications needing mathlib.prc - that definitely locked everything down. Still, nothing like you describe.

It would be interesting to see if we have the same version - you mention "reserving 64MB", which doesn't seem to be an option for the version I have. Could you please try the following:

1. Open an xterm
2. Enter /usr/bin/gvm/gvm --help | head -1

My version prints 'Garnet (tm) VM v1.0 (Prod-Release) - Build 564139 (Nov 12 2007-17:46:49)'