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Recover from a desktop preference crash
Authored by: rrrus on May 01, '03 04:41:09AM

I recently encountered a similar situation, for the second time.
The situation is where the Desktop preference pane gets in a
mode where it won't come up without crashing system
preferences.

The workaround I had discovered the first time was to either
empty or rename the "/Library/Desktop Pictures" folder so that
the Desktop pref pane couldn't find it anymore. I eventually
fixed this issue by reinstalling Mac OS X. I did the reinstall
because Norton had so completely hosed up my system that it
became unusable, not because the Desktop pref pane crashed.
At the time I blamed it on Norton.

Tonight, I had my PowerBook G3 Pismo hooked up to my TV via
s-video, with the s-video port on, and the LCD off, by plugging
in s-video and a USB mouse. The USB mouse wakes it up, it
realizes the lid is closed, and only activates external video, but
not internal. Natually, the screen size shrunk, but the desktop
image was the same. I then put it back to sleep when I was
done watching DVDs. When I woke it up the next time is when
this problem occurred.

It woke up from sleep with a plain blue background, not my
desktop picture. Openning the Desktop preference pane then
revealed the crash.

Following the lead from this tip, I did a search, using find, for
files recently modified. I'm not sure which did it, but I deleted
the following:

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.desktop.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.systempreferences.plist
and
~/Library/Caches/Desktop/

The desktop.plist was obvious, but didn't work on its own.
systempreferences.plist had a reference to my personal desktop
pictures folder, and the Caches/Desktop folder contained files
named similarly to images that I've used for desktops.

At any rate... deleting those three things alleviated the
problem.

rus



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