Occasionally the bluetooth process can decide it doesn't want to connect to any devices. Turning bluetooth off means you can't re-enable, but with Bluetooth Explorer, you can force it to do so.
When in this broken Bluetooth state, trying to connect to any Bluetooth device will cause an error. I usually try turning off Bluetooth when it has issues, but in this state it will refuse to turn back on (the menu bar option for 'Turn Bluetooth On' is greyed out). I'm sure a restart would fix, but I've found that if you have the Developer Utilities installed, Bluetooth Explorer.app will do the trick.
Simply start up the app, located in /Developer/Applications/Utilities/Bluetooth/, and it will give you a message about turning on the controller -- ignore this, as it doesn't seem to help. Once it's started, go to the 'Utilities' menu and select 'HCI Controller Selector'. In most machines, I think you'll just have one 'Apple Inc, Bluetooth USB Host Controller.' Select the controller, hit 'Activate', and Bluetooth goes back to normal.
[crarko adds: I don't know if this is just 10.5 specific. I've never encountered the issue. However, the Bluetooth Explorer utility can provide a wealth of information about not just your controller, but any Bluetooth device it can detect. Go to Devices» Show Device Discovery and then select a device and click 'Get Device Info...' It's a handy little app.]
When in this broken Bluetooth state, trying to connect to any Bluetooth device will cause an error. I usually try turning off Bluetooth when it has issues, but in this state it will refuse to turn back on (the menu bar option for 'Turn Bluetooth On' is greyed out). I'm sure a restart would fix, but I've found that if you have the Developer Utilities installed, Bluetooth Explorer.app will do the trick.
Simply start up the app, located in /Developer/Applications/Utilities/Bluetooth/, and it will give you a message about turning on the controller -- ignore this, as it doesn't seem to help. Once it's started, go to the 'Utilities' menu and select 'HCI Controller Selector'. In most machines, I think you'll just have one 'Apple Inc, Bluetooth USB Host Controller.' Select the controller, hit 'Activate', and Bluetooth goes back to normal.
[crarko adds: I don't know if this is just 10.5 specific. I've never encountered the issue. However, the Bluetooth Explorer utility can provide a wealth of information about not just your controller, but any Bluetooth device it can detect. Go to Devices» Show Device Discovery and then select a device and click 'Get Device Info...' It's a handy little app.]
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