My month is always January!

I have a minor, but fairly annoying problem. Most of my computer thinks that it's January all-year round. When click on the "Date and Time" section of the toolbar, the greyed out month is always January. The day of the month is correct, and the year is correct, but the month stays the same.

When I open up the "date and time" section of system prefs, and try to set it manually, it's already technically correct; the month is August. I don't know what to do.

The date is correct in Mail and iCal, but all my events in iPhoto apparently take place in January. I've looked around everywhere for a solution, and have come up entirely empty-handed.

Any suggestions?

Replace com.apple.iPhoto.plist ? (If you don't know the drill, ask for step-by-step procedure.)

Reinstall iPhoto? You say "most of my computer thinks that it's January" then only mention iPhoto events being stuck (frozen? winterized?). Kind of inconsistent, hard to interpret.

Hi there,

Thanks very much for your reply.

I somehow don't think that fooling around with iPhoto is going to solve the problem completely, but if you would like to provide me the instructions that you alluded to, I would be more than happy to try it out.

Here's why I don't think that it's just an iPhoto problem, and it's mainly my fault for not being more specific earlier. But I wasn't any more specific before because I couldn't really think of anywhere else to look in order to prove that my system was screwy.

So, I did some more checking around, and found that all my Safari history is from January. Also, when I check the "Get Info" box for any of my files, they were all apparently created and modified in various times through January.

I guess I should also tell you my Mac's specs. I'm on a 2.66Ghz MacBook Pro, 4GB ram, running OS 10.5.7.

Thanks for the help so far, I'm glad that at least SOMEONE is looking at this thread.

Are you using NTP?

NTP as in... setting the date and time automatically?

Yes. That was my default setting, and when I noticed the problem, I tried manually setting the date. Sure, the month in the dialog box was set to August, but the greyed out date when I clicked on the time in the toolbar still said January... 2009. So I changed it back to automatically setting the time for me. Nothing happened.

I should mention that the "time server" in the screenshot you provided is different from any of the options that it gives me. Mine is currently set to: "Apple Americas/U.S. (time.apple.com)"

Thanks for the suggestion!

yes, sorry.. I've sort of.. hacked my NTP configuration

I wonder if there's a corrupt preference involved. You could try moving your /Library/Preferences directory to something like Preferences.old and rebooting.. that would rebuild those and if it was one.. it'd be corrected (the problem with that is your preferences are gone ... then again, you can always move the old dir back.)

Dysfunction is suggesting a similar approach to what I posted above, only now it's pretty clear that it's not just an iPhoto problem. It would be nice to narrow it down to a few culprits, and replace their particular plist files rather than starting over. I have more than 140 plist files in my Preferences folder.

Library>Preferences is not a complete roadmap to finding the appropriate folder. You have several Library folders. Each user has its own Library folder. If this problem is only happening when a particular user is logged in, focus on that user folder first.

Go to Users>"user name">Library>Preferences
Move specific plist files out of that folder
Start up the program(s) associated with those files - new files will be made
If the problem goes away, you can delete the files you moved

I don't see a specific file for "Date & Time" - that would be nice in this case.
You can try moving a few out at a time that seem related to System functions, and Restart. If you've changed a bunch of preferences, you will lose your changes, so keep the files in case you want to put them back (overwriting the new ones that were created). Doing this incrementally will pinpoint the culprit, if one is found.