01-06-2007, 12:42 AM

Hey guys,
I was testing out all the screen savers in my new MBP. I was playing around with the options for the album art screen saver and I set the number of rows to 2 so i could see what it looked like. After hitting 'ok', i got an error that says 'The application System Preferences quit unexpectedly.'

So i hit 'reopen' and when i went back to the screen saver settings it instantly closed the system prefs and i got an error message that said 'The application System Preferences closed unexpectedly after it was reopened.' So i clicked on 'Try Again' and clicked on the screen saver prefs again. This time I could open them and change them so i changed the album artwork screen saver number of rows back to 5.

Finally, after closing the system prefs., i got a message that says 'System Preferences - New Settings - New settings have been created for this application. Do you wish to use these settings from now on?' with the options 'Use new settings' and 'Use original settings.' I clicked on 'Use new settings' but when i start the screen saver, it is showing up as 2 rows. And when i go back to system prefs, the entire cycle happens again.

I know, long description, but I am really at a loss of what to do. Im not sure how I broke it. I am new to macs but am fairly computer literate and i just cant figure out what happened. I have restarted the comp but no luck.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks a lot!
~Jim

01-06-2007, 12:56 AM

try the basics, like repairing disk permissions and emptying your cache with a program like onyx or mainmenu.

there's probably also a .plist file you could remove to reset things, but i'm not sure where that is, or what it woudl be named since i don't have my mac at work now...

01-06-2007, 01:03 AM

I went searching on Google after posting this and found a solution that worked. You need to delete 'com.apple.sreensaver.iTunesArtwork.####.plist' Apparently this is a known problem when switching the number of rows to 2. Weird problem.
Thanks guys.

01-06-2007, 01:08 AM

*)EDIT(*
OK, so by the time I wrote all this out, the prob was solved and a known issue uncovered. Dismiss most of what's below.

The number of rows is just your preference and whether or not you have 2 or 5. You didn't cause any problems by changing the pref, you're allowed to and it doesn't really matter how many rows it's set to display.

What caused the System Preferences to crash is the main thing. I had the exact same experience with FireFox yesterday but it eventually sorted itself out. The same will no doubt happen on your Mac. It sometimes happens and it's quite difficult to know the exact cause, more a case of try this or that or keep an eye on things to see if it happens on a regular basis.

I gather what you're concerned about is that you feel you've meddled with something important that you shouldn't have touched. This is not true. It's probably not going to happen again.

Are you saying that when you try to set the amount of rows to display back to 5 that Sys Prefs starts crashing?

01-06-2007, 01:24 AM

Originally Posted by Teufelhunde389

I went searching on Google after posting this and found a solution that worked. You need to delete 'com.apple.sreensaver.iTunesArtwork.####.plist' Apparently this is a known problem when switching the number of rows to 2. Weird problem.
Thanks guys.

Yep, sure is. It's happened to me a few times. The fix is exactly what you posted.