Help Browser Not Responding

I posted in another thread about my girlfriend getting an iBook today and the woes of connecting it to AOL broadband. But something equally upsetting keeps happening. When you click on help for any given application, including Finder, none of the links to help subjects take you anywhere. Even when you search and options come up, you can click all you want, or click Show and at best, all it does is take you to the Help home. It's very strange, and it stopped doing it for a while but now it started up again. When it's acting up, only one of the links works, and that's getting to know your iBook G4. Any ideas?

Are these third-party applications, because some apps' help sections are completely missing, because they don't bother to write anything for them. Clicking on a link in a help section usually mean the app will direct you to the developers website. Are you online when in the help section?

It was with all applications, not just third party ones. We got it fixed though, I found a website which talked about it and gave some possible solutions. One involved deleting the preference file for help viewer in your home folder library, and it worked like a charm.

Oh, that's great. I'm sure that will help other people who stumble upon this thread with your same problem.

Sorry to dig up an old thread

Hi,

This is the exact same problem I have been getting and a number of the Tiger based Macs in our showroom are doing the same thing. It seems like 'something' is continually corrupting the **** Help View preferences file, this is on 10.4, and the 10.4.1 and 10.4.2 updates.

It is doing it on my iBook too, open up the Help Viewer in any application or Finder and at best it gets to the base help page but clicking the links does nothing. It is becoming infuriating because no matter how many times I delete the preferences file and the help related folder in the cache folder, it comes back straight again and it's screwed up again. In this case I rebooted, all was fine again with Help Viewer.

Then I opened Safari, went to check Help Viewer. Same thing.

I could do this all day long delete the prefs file and the cache folder if present, temporarily fixed, and then at some arbitrary point it dies again.

What is doing this? Is it a particular application corrupting the prefs/cache constantly? Bear in mind, that the 15" Powerbook we have in our showroom has the same issue, mine and that both Tiger based systems, and inherrently my notebook has software that PBook doesn't.

It is getting very tiring and a solutions needs to be found as I am not convinced a re-install will sort it. Especially with all the bits I have now set up on here. :/

I'm used to solving everyone else's problems with their Macs and almost always find the solution to a problem, but this one has me completely stumped.

Thanks,
Vicky.

Hiya,

Well, I went for it and re-installed from scratch.

Though, that helped not at all. Within a few moments of using Tiger, no extra applications installed, the prefs/cache had become corrupted again and needed deleting.

How can it be that this happens on two powerbooks at least, both on 10.4; and bar a few messages online -- not everyone seems to 'suffer' from it. Seems incredibly weird, infuriating and counts at least to me as a broken feature. (No 3rd party apps apart from the basic PowerBook G4 install DVDs, that is all, so the corruption occured from Apple's base install.

Using Onyx helps - but no different from deleting files manually; and the problem re-occurs too. Either way if I see no resolution, I might have to escalate this with our technical dept. and see what they have to say. I know the iMac 17/20"'s we have in the showroom have Tiger on; but they don't exhibit this behaviour.

Hopefully someone here has an idea.

Thanks,
Vicky.

That's a real pain! Even though you have tried many times deleting the pref. files and cache, maybe you are missing some that need to still be deleted, try trashing these:

/Home/Library/Preferences/com.apple.help.plist
/Home/Library/Preferences/com.apple.helpui.plist
/Home/Library/Preferences/com.apple.helpviewer.plist

And then trash the /Home/Library/Caches/com.apple.helpui folder.

Then restart the computer.

iWhat said:

That's a real pain! Even though you have tried many times deleting the pref. files and cache, maybe you are missing some that need to still be deleted, try trashing these:

/Home/Library/Preferences/com.apple.help.plist
/Home/Library/Preferences/com.apple.helpui.plist
/Home/Library/Preferences/com.apple.helpviewer.plist

And then trash the /Home/Library/Caches/com.apple.helpui folder.

Then restart the computer.

Click to expand...

Hiya,

Thanks for the reply but those are the files I am deleting already. Though the 3 pref files above aren't always there, might just be one or two of them. It varies.

-- NOTE --

Just to add: I have been googling about this for the past couple of days, it appears that I'm not the only one with this issue and it seems like it might be a bug as such with Help Viewer in 10.4.x on iBooks and Powerbooks. There are quite a few others who have posted the problem but no solution has availed itself yet.

In the meantime I can carry on deleting those files and rebooting - which I refuse to do now as it's stupidness, or I can just face the fact that as far as Help Viewer goes on my laptop and others, that it is broken. I sure hope Apple fix it as it's not really a good thing in my book. I could understand if I had lots of 3rd party stuff on here, interacting in a bad way but this is reporting about a fresh install from scratch. IMHO; it's an unacceptable problem and situation.

Vicky

Ok, I have installed 10.4.1 and 10.4.2 updates, Safari 2.0.1 update and the recent security update.

And Mac Help seems to be working again now.

We will see for how long