Troubleshooting tip...

I had a real weird issue recently with a transaction entry widget for iBank... the durned thing wouldn't work for nothing. Deleting the pref files, reinstalling, etc... nothing worked. After unsuccessfully troubleshooting with tech support via their forums, I decided I'd have to get my hands dirty and go on a serious bug hunt.

I found the widget worked fine on my wife's account and on a backup install of OS X, so clearly it was my account. So something must be amiss in my user Library. After carefully deleting and restoring items in my user Library and re-logging in-between, I narrowed the culprit down to a hidden pref file:
~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist

I have no idea how or why this hidden pref file would block a 3rd party widget from working, yet clearly it was. This is also at least the 2nd time I've had a problem in all the time I've been using OS X that I've narrowed down a bug to that particular file. I'm betting now it may have been the culprit a couple times I decided to just whack the Library and start from scratch.

So... the reason I bring this up is that when someone is having problems with an app or their system, it may be worth having them delete this file and relog to see if it was the culprit. Being a hidden file and not an obvious place to start even if it wasn't, deleting it may save some headaches.

that's interesting, I wonder if it will cure the firefox crashes at work that only harm my user account

louishen said:

that's interesting, I wonder if it will cure the firefox crashes at work that only harm my user account

Click to expand...

It's worth a shot. I stared and stared at the contents of that file and am absolutely baffled that it could have caused a problem, yet so it did. *shrug*

Thanks for the tip.