10.4: A fix for Photo Booth not quitting properly

Mar 02, '07 07:30:05AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

I recently found that after using Photo Booth on an MacBook Pro running 10.4.8, the app did not completely close out, preventing you from running it again without re-logging in.

What would happen is that the Photo Booth window would close, but the dock icon would indicate that it was running (and Command-Tab would show it still running as well). However, Activity Monitor would not list it, and trying to force quit the app from the Dock icon would have no effect. Also, trying to kill -9 the process from the command line had no effect. This prevented me from using Photo Booth again until I logged out and back in again.

A brief search found a request in these forums from a few people with the same problem, so I looked further into it. By switching to another account and running Photo Booth and examing it in Activity Monitor, I found that one of the files the app was using was /Library » Quicktime » macam.component. This was installed by an app called Macam, which allows QuickTime to use USB web cams. I had this installed before to test a camera for a Windows client.

Getting rid of this file solved the problem for me; Photo Booth now exits normally. I had to restart in single user mode and delete the file from the command line, as trying to do in whilst logged in to my account would give me the error that it was in use. I downloaded Macam again from Sourgeforge, but did not see an uninstaller package, or instructions on how to do so.

Hope this will help others who have been plauged by the same problem.

Comments (4)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20070301121953334