07-05-2008, 12:19 PM

I'm on my G4 dual 1.25 with 2 gig ram and have just upgraded to 10.5.4. Restarted, Mail opens and "Unexpectively Quits" every time. So I did the obvious (I think), I re-downloaded the 10.5.4 upgrades and tried again in case of download corruption, no change. Opened in another account and all was well, so went back to the original and moved the "com.apple.mail.plist" to desktop and restarted. Nope, so dragged mailboxes to the second drive and also the Mail and Mail downloads to the that drive as well and reinstalled Mail from the Leopard disc. Restarted, nope, although it did stay on screen for all off 5 seconds. Bit the bullet and reinstalled all of Leopard from the start, but keeping the accounts. No go. Short of formatting and starting again, I'm now in your hands. Oh I WISH I'd stuck with 10.5.3. Hope I've covered all I've done, I KNOW you're sat there thinking "Ahhh!" I bet he didn't do ....?????? I would really appreciate any help, Mail is very much part of my life. Please excuse me if this is too long as this is my first ever post.

07-05-2008, 02:52 PM

Welcome!

You have the right idea, however there are a few .plists for mail. An easy way would be to download Preferential Treatment. It will look for corrupt preference files. You'll be able to delete them from there.

07-06-2008, 06:12 AM

Thanks for the welcome and the advise. It is quite daunting the first post. I'll be in front of the G4 tomorrow(Monday) so will do as you suggest and let you know. Really appreciate the help.

07-08-2008, 09:22 AM

Thanks again for Preferential Treatment, however, it found no errors on either user or system scans. I sent the "Mail" folder and associated plist from the G5 and it still freezes and goes away. It works fine on the new admin user I created, although I obviously will have to set up all new mailboxes.... unless I copy those and see whether they work??? If I didn't know better I'd say their was a little virus playing with me... but we are on Macs?? Thanks again, Slotype

07-08-2008, 10:33 AM

Hmm...Well, the problem is definately in your home folder, as the other account works. I'll see if I can fond a better solution for you.

07-09-2008, 04:33 PM

Just a thought, but try repairing permissions with Disk Utility.

07-10-2008, 03:40 PM

Thanks Soulwar. Since my last post. I opened the other account for mail to act exactly the same... after I imported the address book archive I think (paranoia might have set it in though:-)). I did the Repair Permissions after Preferential Treatment, then repair disk. All to no avail. Another thing was I couldn't alter the permissions even as an Administrator for using Disk Warrior CD. Followed the instructions but the Lock was greyed out.Anyway, I'm VERY tempted to reinstall on a clean drive. ( I have all the thousands of photos for my business and holiday snaps, plus all the other stuff on a Lacie 500 gig drive on the G5). I could then firewire the Lacie to a nice new Leopard install and have the fantastic job of re-installing all the applications and settings from the Firewire backup... Oh Joy!!!!. Thanks again for all your help, I'll give it a day or two and have a rethink before such drastic action... what a pain though. 8 years on a Mac with no problems and now this??? Still prefer the Mac though... LOL

07-10-2008, 03:55 PM

There is definitely some corruption somewhere...
How about give OnyX a try. Run the maintenance scripts, delete the caches, etc...
See if that helps before trying the reconstruction.

07-11-2008, 06:50 PM

Thanks again Soulwar, I'm on the G4 tomorrow (Saturday), so will give OnyX a go. I'll let you know.... it's a saga.....

07-12-2008, 10:27 AM

Hey Soulwar, OK. So I downloaded OnyX (great programme)... like a free Disk Warrior. Anyway, ran through all the possibilities, clean as a whistle, started mail....crashed. Thanks again for all your help. It's starting to annoy me and I want to know WHY. So I made a guest account and opened Mail... it stayed open!!! Shocked? I was. So I copied the plist from that home folder and replaced it in my admin home folder and...... it crashed LOL. I've gone through most of the manuals I have and can't find anything. Apple support tried the plist thing we've done and told me to back up and Erase and Install. It's just really annoying not to know why (I'm so sad that I need to know :-)). I'll rethink it all on Sunday, and If not I'll do the Erase and Install thing and hope THAT works!! Thanks again for all your help and advise. It's most appreciated.

07-12-2008, 10:44 AM

You're welcome. I wish I had an answer for you as well!

I've read people having similar problems, with different apps, after the update. Their solution was to delete everything related to that program and reinstall. (application, .plists, receipts, etc.)

Last try before the Erase and install? Good luck and let us know what happens!

07-14-2008, 05:03 PM

Hey Slotype, I ran into the same problem with Mail. I open it, it shows the window, and then crashes on me.

I came upon this post looking for a way to fix it. I read the whole thread and saw no solutions though.

So I set out to find my own. I fixed it, and here's how. I hope it helps you before you get to reformatting!

When Mail crashes, it gives you that whole "Mail has quit unexpectedly" error. Then it gives you the buttons for Ingore, Report, and Relaunch. If you click Report, you can get some info on why exactly it crashed. In the Windows world, this stuff is usually gibberish.

And that was true for OS X, too, except I did manage to find a line that interested me. Here's what it said.

"*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInternalInconsistencyException', reason: 'trying to set a non-ToDo MailboxUid for a ToDo. The MailboxUid for a ToDo must be a ToDosMailboxUid'"

It mentions a ToDo item. iCal and Mail share ToDo data. So I went into iCal, sorted all my ToDo items, and deleted them all. You can highlight them all by clicking the first one, the shift+clicking the last one. Then hit Edit -> Delete.

Once they were all gone, I Quit from iCal. Then I opened Mail and Mail worked properly!

This is what I figure was the culprit. I downloaded and used a Dashboard Widget called DoBeDo. It let me quickly manage my ToDo list in iCal without having to open iCal. But it seems some of the ToDo items it creates are corrupt. I've stopped using DoBeDo and things are running smoothly again.

I hope this helps you!

Edit: Grammar and clarity.

07-15-2008, 09:07 AM

Thanks for that as well. I really do appreciate everyones contribution. Anyway inspired by davidr, I've trolled through the gobbledegook and only found a couple of things that are somewhere close to any language I understand. Thread 10 is the culprit as you can see.

Thread 10 Crashed:
0 com.apple.CoreData 0x95cf0920 -[NSSQLRow setForeignKeySlot:int64:] + 24
1 com.apple.CoreData 0x95d142a0 _populateRowValuesOnBackgroundThread + 1088
2 com.apple.CoreData 0x95cc6cdc minion_duties2 + 224
3 libSystem.B.dylib 0x90e3eb98 _pthread_start + 316

Somewhere there is a com.apple.CoreData preference I could trash, but I can't seem to find it (probably hidden away so the likes of me can't mess with it). LOL

Let's be honest here.... I really am now in a pitch black mazed tunnel with no torch (flashlight) and grasping at a straw that only a twenty something with an IQ of approx 220 and has been studying Unix since before he (or she) could say Dadda possesses. I am able to get emails on a second machine at the shop but it's a PC (Hushmymouth). Of course Mobile ME has started and it'd be nice to have all the computers working properly. I'll give it day or 2 to transfer data to the other drives and blitz this one this weekend. That'll give time to have another think. Thanks again to you all.

07-15-2008, 09:20 AM

Hi Again, Sorry to put yet more flies in the ointment, just read that Growl has been known to cause problems and found an old mail message in spotlight, so thought I'd start mail via this route and it still crashed, but thread 15 was the culprit this time... oh well I'll carry on archiving :0)

07-15-2008, 09:35 AM

Sorry, me again, Although Thread 15 crashed (and has again a second ago) the error lines are exactly the same, except 15 and not 10 as the original. I'm going now... honest!!