A fix for unexpected application quits on menu bar click

Jul 14, '03 09:19:00AM

Contributed by: ichou

Starting suddenly this week, Safari would unexpectedly quit whenever I tried to click on the menu bar. This problem soon infected other applications, including Mail, iCal, and iPhoto. The menu items work fine using keyboard shortcuts, but the application always immediately quits. All of the CrashReporter log files look like the applications were all crashing in a smiliar routines.

The only thing out of the ordinary that I had done recently was mess with the Chinese Input Method in the International Control Panel, and reading hints from this web site, I caught a glimmer that Adobe Acrobat (which was not one of the affected programs) would unexpectedly quit and messing with the International control panel would fix it.

Changing the language from English to something else and then back to English did not fix anything. However, setting the preference to a different language caused the menu bar to work again, except in a foreign language. I decided that the English locale information for these applications must have been corrupted, so I proceeded to reinstall applications starting with Safari.

What was interesting was that reinstalling Safari fixed all the menus of all the other applications. Something that Safari installs affects every other application, which I guess has to do with being the default browser and getting added to the Finder's Services menu item.

So, the moral of the story, first try reinstalling Safari. Hope this saves other people four or five hours of trouble shoooting.

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