Re-enable iChat image pasting

May 10, '04 11:09:00AM

Contributed by: robg

There are times when my iChat application seems to lose its ability to paste an image. This is different than the "rend errors" discussed in this previous hint. Instead, I get a message about AIM just not being able to send the message. Typically, this seems to happen after I've tried to paste a region capture to someone who's using GAIM on Linux or Adium or some other AIM client that doesn't support image transfer. Once I've seen the message once, iChat is incapable of pasting any images into any chats, even after quitting and restarting iChat. The only way I knew to clear it up was to logout and login, which is obviously time consuming, given that I've usually got 20 to 30 apps running.

This weekend, while researching another issue, I stumbled across a solution that doesn't require a logout ... as mentioned in this hint about iChat's idle timeout, there's a background process called iChatAgent that continues to run even after you quit iChat. Solving my image pasting problems simply required quitting iChat, and then killing the existing agent in the Terminal:

 killall iChatAgent
You could also use the Activity Monitor, but the Terminal is always close at hand on my machine. When you re-launch iChat, the Agent is re-started, and (at least on my machine) image pasting is once again functional.

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20040510080931379