Macbook Pro help option shows nothing

Goodness knows what I've done...

1. Open up Help from the top bar
2. Type in a search term to get a list of possible subjects
3. Select any one of the subjects.
4. Nothing.... The list of subjects disappears, no information, nothing at all.

From what application?

Any and all!


Update: From 'Finder' I get a message simply saying 'Help not available for Finder'.

Update 2: From 'Facetime' it's 'Help isn't available for Facetime'.

Hmm, this machine is only 2 weeks old, maybe it's built wrong? Surely not...

It's a brand new machine and help is missing from all your applications? We have to ask... have you done anything such as move, change, remove, files or folders? In other words, have you been messing with things? Please understand, we're not trying to chastise you but sometimes new users of OS X unknowingly do things that can cause damage to the operating system.

Also are you online when this happens? A lot of the help files need to be downloaded.

I would easily believe that I could mess things up and yes I'm on-line.

Telephone support told me to (a) move 3 files from preferences (e.g. com.apple.help.plist was one) to the desktop and (b) restart my machine. This fixed the problem.

The operative then told me he wasn't sure if it was the restart or the move of files that did it.

I was under the impression that 'turn it off, turn it on again' was only for PCs not Macs


I am now to work for a few days and if everything's OK to move the 3 files to trash.

This all seems very odd to me...

When in doubt, don't throw it out, reboot! Glad to hear everything is OK.