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Fix broken drag and drop in 10.2.6 Desktop
Just a small hint in case anyone has this same problem as me ... I had a bizarre problem whereby I suddenly couldn't drag and drop anything -- not in the Finder or System Preferences or anywhere else.

First thing I tried was deleting preferences, but that didn't work. So I just simply reinstalled 10.2.6 combo updater and everything was back to normal.

[robg adds: Apple has a Knowledge Base article about this problem, but it's a bit older and refers to 10.2.2 as fixing the issue. This is the first I've heard of the problem in 10.2.6, but if you've had a similar problem, please share your experience (and the fix!).]
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Fix broken drag and drop in 10.2.6 | 14 comments | Create New Account
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Fix broken drag and drop in 10.2.6
Authored by: diego.gallina on Jun 05, '03 10:30:03AM

I've occasionally had drag and drop stop working after a long time logged into the same desktop session (a few weeks of heavy use). A log-out and log-in or, at the most, a reboot has always fixed it.

I've assumed it was bug in Finder. Haven't had it happen again since 10.2.6 update, but then again I haven't had a continuous month of uptime yet either.



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Fix broken drag and drop in 10.2.6
Authored by: wgscott on Jun 05, '03 11:51:33AM

At last, an explanation for why so many quicktime updates with so many obligated reboots. If Apple can limit your uptime to 5 days, the problem "goes away."



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Fix broken drag and drop in 10.2.6
Authored by: felium on Jun 05, '03 11:07:17AM

Drag and drop dropped from one of the eMac's [Mac OS X 10.2.6] here in the studio, and booting from the installer disk and running the Disk Utilities app to repair permissions seemed to restore that functionally...



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Fix broken drag and drop in 10.2.6
Authored by: Shadowcharly on Jun 05, '03 11:16:24AM

I had this problem too for a while and in my case, it was because the process called "pbs" aka "paste board server" aka "our dear clipboard manager for all the fricking computer" stoped working due to a chronic crashing.

I can't remember exactly how i fixed, as it has never returned, but the proccess included the repair privileges maneouver, and substituting the binarie with another new one i got from a properly working computer. Maybe the bin copying was unnedeed, but you know, once you start tingling with your poor system, you can't stop yourself! ;)

I think the repair privileges, and one restart of the system may be enough. And if anyone has the same problem, please try to locate if you pbs is working properly, just for curiosity.

Hope it helps

---

--
Shadowcharly

"What a strange game. The only winning move is not to play"

Wargames. Computer's final conclusion about war.



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Fix broken drag and drop in 10.2.6
Authored by: thekapper on Jun 05, '03 11:36:20AM

After never having this problem before this occured last night on my 1st Generation TiBook running 10.2.6.

I had restarted the TiBook after it was acting very strangely, the Finder kept quitting itself. After the reboot i couldn't drag-and-drop anything. I then restarted the TiBook again and everything seemed to be fine.

---
"The day you die will be like any other...only shorter." -Samuel Beckett



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Fix broken drag and drop in 10.2.6
Authored by: maguirer on Jun 05, '03 01:06:25PM

This has been happening to me all the time ever since 10.2.4 (still does with 10.2.6). A restart usually fixes it (for a few hours anyway), and is not the best solution since I run a Web server off my mac. Repair permissions have never done much for me. I haven't tried the combo updater, but I will the next time it happens (which will likely be tonight).



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Fix broken drag and drop in 10.2.6
Authored by: bluehz on Jun 05, '03 01:30:03PM
This is a known problem. The solution is simply to delete the icon cache found in /Library/Caches/ whose name is "com.apple.dock.iconcache.#USERNAME#"

I wish I remembered where I clipped this from so I could give proper credit... but I didn't ref it properly in my notes...sorry

OS X: coreservicesd crashing, icons not moving

This message is in response to various reader reports where, after some issue (e.g. applications crashing) no icons on the Mac's desktop can be moved.

This has happened to me more than once, and has also happened in systems pre 10.2.

In all cases this was due to the crashing of a system daemon called coreservicesd. In pre 10.2 systems the Mac won't boot at all. Logging in remotely and killing coreservicesd (which would use a lot of processor time) would continue the boot process, but icons wouldn't be movable and the clipboard wouldn't work.

In pre 10.2 systems the problem is solved by trashing the LS databases in ~/Library/Preferences/ but beware that some internet preferences (default browser) are also lost by trashing these databases.

In 10.2 and 10.2.1 simply trash the icon cache found in /Library/Caches/ whose name is "com.apple.dock.iconcache.". Or simply trash the complete Caches directory. If the system won't boot, start in single user mode to delete those items. After removing these the system will usually be fine again.



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Fix broken drag and drop in 10.2.6
Authored by: Han Solo on Jun 06, '03 10:52:21AM

I don't know about this exact text, but it appears to resemble a discussion on Macintouch several months back. I too ran into this problem (with 10.2.3), and deleting the iconcache file (as well as several others recommended there) only temporarily "solved" the problem -- in the end, I too had to reinstall from the combo updater. After that, the problem has not (yet) returned. (Knock on particle board....) As always, YMMV.



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Fix broken drag and drop in 10.2.6: beware...
Authored by: tinker on Jul 19, '03 07:12:51PM

I ran into this problem (drag and drop not working) yesterday. I tried reinstalling the 10.2.6 comprehensive upgrade -- no dice. I tried deleting com.apple.dock.iconcache.myname, still no dice. I tried trashing the whole Caches directory; when I rebooted, all of the icons were generic, either dog-eared paper or folders -- documents couldn't identify their applications -- and I still couldn't drag and drop anything. Tried booting in single-user mode and fsck -y -ing a few times, then rebooting. Nada. It was also starting to engage in some very strange behavior: not showing the moving bar and giving details about what it was doing on startup, for example. Then it asked me for my username and password and wouldn't let me in. At that point I figured I was done for. Fortunately, a reboot fixed that... this time.

(I can sense the reader thinking, Good God, man, back the thing up -- you're going down! I'm getting there....)

Tried one more 10.2.6 comprehensive install. Nothing. Finally, out of curiosity, I copied /Library/Caches/ from my most recent backup (I knew there was a reason I backed up /Library), rebooted, and, thank God, I've at least got icons back, documents recognize their applications, etc. -- except for the ones I installed very recently, which are still generic.

NOW I'm backing up, and writing this on a different machine. I have no idea what's causing the drag problem, still (any suggestions welcome!!), and I'm a bit worried that I'm not getting startup info, but I'd say that trashing the entire Cache directory was definitely a step in the wrong direction. Caveat lector....



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DON'T DO THAT!!!
Authored by: cparnot on Nov 11, '03 11:53:17PM

I am not saying that deleting those cache files will never work, but it can also make things worse. Here comes another example to add to the various comments of this thread...

I had that problem of broken drag-and-drop (no problem with copy and paste), and no process 'coreservicesd' running (but process 'pbs' all right, so copy and paste definitely seems to be a separate problem).

I did just what is said here, ie delete the cache files described in this post, thinking that Cache files are anyway meant to be deleted at some point, right?

Oups... After restarting, I got that little black wheel spinning forever (I waited at least 15 minutes). After force-rebooting on my OS 9 partition, I had a very nasty message, something like: "cannot mount the 'OS X' partition. Do you want to initialize your disk?" NO!!! I was not able to get it back with the Disk Utility on the Jaguar CD. Finally, Norton Was able to fix the Catalog Tree stuff, whatever that is. At least, I could read and back up the partition.

The drag-and-drop was not fixed, though. However, after running the X.2.8 combo installation (why did not I do that in the first place!!), the computer was back to its normal behavior. Pfou...

Conclusion: don't touch those Cache file without great caution; they might sometimes be corrupted but in other cases, they might actually be helping when something else is wrong.
(this is my interpretation)

---
charles



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Fix broken drag and drop in 10.2.6
Authored by: dbrutus on Jun 05, '03 02:47:59PM

I actually have something that is not the same but may be related. RealBasic has a drag and drop feature for dragging exported modules, classes, and other neat stuff into projects. If you drag holding the option key, you are supposed to get an external project link (which is great when you have a class or module that can be distributed across several projects and you want to keep it in sync everywhere).

Drag and drop work for me normally but option-dragging imports normally and does not create a link.



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Fix broken drag and drop in 10.2.6
Authored by: kholburn on Jun 08, '03 05:30:50AM

I had this problem when I first upgraded one system to 10.2 . No pbs, no drag and drop, no copy and paste. Eventually I discovered that an application I had was crashing pbs at login. pbs scans all your applications on login and I had one application that crashed it. When I found the problem Application and deleted it the problem went away.



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Fix broken drag and drop in 10.2.6
Authored by: spudboy on Sep 08, '03 06:59:50PM

this problem just appeared for me in 10.2.4 on a PB G3 400, and i tried deleting just the "com.cache.dock.icon" file (or whatever the name is) -- didn't work. tried deleting the "/Library/Caches" folder and it's fixed!

thanks for the info to all of you, this saved m'butt.



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Update for 10.2.8
Authored by: cparnot on Nov 11, '03 11:59:40PM

My problem was very similar:
* no drag and drop in the Finder or Safari (did not check other apps, but probably system-wide)
* no 'coreservicesd' process running (as shown using '/Applications/Utilities/Process Viewer')

The difference was that I was running 10.2.8.
Running the 10.2.8 combo installer fixed the problem.

Additional comments:
-see my other post on the same thread about deleting some cache files
-this is different from the copy-and-paste problem mentioned in the thread: copy and paste worked fine, and the process 'pbs' was running fine

---
charles



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