02-18-2012, 06:46 PM

When I open the Trash, instead of saying "Empty Trash" it says "N201." The grey bar also says "N39" and I've noticed that a lot of other things say similar things. How can I get it back to normal?

02-18-2012, 10:12 PM

What version of OS X are you running? Have you applied a theme of any sort?

Run Font Book, Press COMMAND A to select all fonts, then validate the fonts from the menu.

02-18-2012, 11:56 PM

I'm using Snow Leopard and I'm nott using any themes. It says all my fonts are safe to use.

02-19-2012, 08:35 AM

Originally Posted by wolvves

I'm using Snow Leopard and I'm nott using any themes. It says all my fonts are safe to use.

Which exact version number of Snow Leopard? Have you applied any updates lately?

Log in to another user on your Mac and see if the problem is there also.

Where it says N39, it should say Trash. And where it says N201, it should say Empty. Something is corrupted somewhere, not sure what. I'm going to throw out some random ideas here.

Go to System Preferences » Language & Text and double check your language the Language tab. If it's not your preferred language up top, change it and log out, then back in and see if that fixes it.

If your preferred language is correct, then temporarily drag a different one to the top (one that you are comfortable enough to read), log out and back in, then change it back.

If that doesn't work, try changing the system font. To do so, download TinkerTool and from its Fonts menu, change System (headlines) to something else. Then restart Finder from TinkerTool's Finder menu. See if that fixes N39 to say Trash. If not, reset to defaults and restart Finder.

I have some other things to try. Will append to this post as I go along.

Try deleting the Finder's preference file. From Finder's Go menu, select Go to Folder and enter ~/Library/Preferences. Find com.apple.finder.plist and drag it to your Desktop. Then log out and back in. If the problem remains, you can move the file back, or leave the new copy that was auto-made be.

Try running some maintenance tools, especially cache cleaning. You can do that with Onyx. Under the Automation tab, just check off everything and hit Execute.

If that doesn't work… you probably need to start checking your hard drive for possible failure. Onyx does a SMART status check, but it's really only useful if drive failure is imminent. The best tool IMO is TechTool Pro. It can do a surface scan of the drive and is pretty much as definitive a test that you can do. But it's expensive unless you catch it on sale. Next best tool is SMART Utility. It's not free, but is cheap and has a free trial. It does a more thorough analysis of the SMART data and can detect signs of early failure. It's not foolproof, but faster and cheaper than TTP. To do a full test, select your drive from the list on the left; select More Info on the bottom right; Change the drop-down box from Short to Long; then hit Run.

If the drive checks out, then consider downloading the 10.6.8 update combo and apply that. Maybe it will iron out some quirk.

02-19-2012, 08:49 AM

This sounds like a corrupted font cache to me.

You can use Onyx to delete the font caches. It's under Cleaning => Fonts tab. Select all the caches that apply to you and click 'Execute'.

There's a bunch of shareware programs that are a little more user-friendly, and/or dedicated to this task, but Onyx will get the job done and is free.

03-03-2012, 06:49 PM

I'm having exactly the same problems, they are also visible elsewhere other than the trash. As suggested, I downloaded Onyx and did as instructed but to no avail. I then also tried repairing disk permissions and relaunching finder (this worked for someone on another forum) but this had no effect and the issue remains. Any other ideas?

03-06-2012, 04:33 PM

Bumpage