Preference Pane Problems

Ok guys, I'm on my iMac G5 running OS 10.5. (Relative clean.) But I'm having a bit of a problem here, two items in my preference pane just doesn't want to work. I don't know why.

They are: Exposé and Spaces. It just freezes up when I click into them.
Then there's the Desktop and Screensaver. When I go into the desktop part, it's totally fine. But when I click on Screensaver, it locks up like the Exposé pane.

Any clue as to why this is happening? The OS install isn't that all and I've only installed a couple of apps (Adium and Firefox) so I doubt they're causing the problem.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

You didn't happen to reorganize your Apps folder and put the System Preferences into a subfolder, by chance? If so, the System Preferences in particular does act rather wonky if not in the default location.

If that's not what happened… you may need to delete the .prefs file for the System Preferences, located at:
home/Library/Preferences/com.apple.systempreferences

If that doesn't work, then I can only suggest updating to 10.5.8 (if you haven't yet) or redownload the 10.5.8 combo update and reapply that.
Mac OS X 10.5.8 Combo Update

I don't really recall messing around with the system folder, but I wouldn't look past it. I've just installed a massive update (10.5 to 10.5.8) and it's still giving me problems.

I might just have to hunker down and reinstall it tomorrow. Thanks for the help, I appreciate it.

KSon09 said:

I don't really recall messing around with the system folder, but I wouldn't look past it. I've just installed a massive update (10.5 to 10.5.8) and it's still giving me problems.

I might just have to hunker down and reinstall it tomorrow. Thanks for the help, I appreciate it.

Click to expand...

Mmm.... you may have misunderstood me. I asked if you moved the System Preferences (the actual app) from /Applications to elsewhere. As for the .pref file... the preferences file in your Library may have gotten corrupted. It does happen, unfortunately. If you delete it, it will get rebuilt and hopefully will solve your problem.

If that doesn't work, then try downloading and reapplying the 10.5.8 combo update. Often that will fix a problem and otherwise avoid a needless re-installation of the whole system. It's extremely uncommon for there to really be a need to reinstall OS X, short of a need to roll back to an older version due to problems caused by a newer version.

Ah, that's what you were saying. Sorry about the misunderstanding, was late last night and guess I wasn't firing on all four!

Gonna go have a look see now.

**Edit**
I've not done anything to the OS, all I did was restart last night and now all my Preference Pane items (except a couple) don't have their correct icons.

Here's an attached picture:

KSon09 said:

Ah, that's what you were saying. Sorry about the misunderstanding, was late last night and guess I wasn't firing on all four!

Gonna go have a look see now.

**Edit**
I've not done anything to the OS, all I did was restart last night and now all my Preference Pane items (except a couple) don't have their correct icons.

Here's an attached picture

Click to expand...

Whoa! That's a new one on me. Hmmm. Something is fishy, and I doubt it's the .pref file. I'm wondering if you are having deeper file corruption problems. I would certainly test your hard drive thoroughly... perhaps it is going down. Disk Utility has some tools to do this with.

I did recently, didn't report any problems. I'm going to reinstall and see what happens. If the same thing happens, then there's a problem hardware wise. Thankfully I have a 150gb harddrive laying here new which I can use.

Thanks for the help LifeIsABeach.

**Edit**
I reinstalled 10.5, everything good so far. But if something is wrong, I don't think it'll show right away anyways. But got to put the iMac in my preferred language (English) though, so it was all worth it. (I screwed up the first time and just went with default everything.)

Thanks again for the help Beach!

KSon09 said:

I did recently, didn't report any problems. I'm going to reinstall and see what happens. If the same thing happens, then there's a problem hardware wise. Thankfully I have a 150gb harddrive laying here new which I can use.

Thanks for the help LifeIsABeach.

**Edit**
I reinstalled 10.5, everything good so far. But if something is wrong, I don't think it'll show right away anyways. But got to put the iMac in my preferred language (English) though, so it was all worth it. (I screwed up the first time and just went with default everything.)

Thanks again for the help Beach!

Click to expand...

Well this might be to late.... but if it happens again. Trying doing repair Permissions and Clear The User Caches.... sometimes its stewpid stuff that like that

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.systempreferences.plist

Move that to the Desktop, then go into System Preferences.
Fixed?