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Fight ATSServer stall at login
Authored by: adrianu on May 15, '06 05:16:41PM

Yes, this is a big intermittent problem with fonts on OSX. I can't say I know exactly how it occurs - though I can say it only seemed to happen for the iMac G5s I looked after that had MS Word on them and were regularly used by several different non-admin users (i.e. different users logging in, logging out, probably several times a day)...

I think it is related to the 'corrupt font' problem when starting Word -lots of dialogs coming up saying fonts are corrupt. After reading all over the web about that issue, the workaround I put in place for it was to clear out the font caches at logout and to then restart ATSServer -very similar to the fix given above.

I found this fix also stopped the occasional login hang problems I'd seen (at least I didn't see it happen again for the following couple of months - I don't look after those machines any more).

So, roughly speaking, OSX(10.4?) + Word = dodgy fonts (cache?) --> possible login hangs due to ATS

I don't know if it's only something that shows up on machines that have different users log in regularly? Or perhaps it only needs to be a single non-admin user? -I have to admit that I've never seen it on the iMac G5 I use myself, but then I don't get to use it every day, only log in as admin, tend to keep it logged in like that day after day, nobody else logs in, and I rarely use Word, so it's not that surprising I haven't seen it...

Adrian



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