Adium and Camino crash on start

Hi,

I am very new to Macs, so please bear that in mind.

I installed Adium and Camino and everything was working fine. I later installed macgpg and mac GPG Keychain Access. I installed all the programs using my admin account. However, I do not use the admin account for anything other than administration.

So I logged back in as my regular account, opened GPG Keychain Access and click on Generate (to create my key). GPG Keychain Access crashed. It crashed everytime I open it and click Generate. I temporarily gave up.

I tried to open Camino and Adium, and they both crash (all my other programs still open successfully).

I have tried removing the preferences files for all those programs as well as removing the Application Support files for both.
To be exact:
~/Library/Preferences/com.adiumX.adiumX.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.adiumX.crashReporter.plist
~/Library/Preferences/org.mozilla.camino.plist
~/Library/Preferences/net.sourceforge.macgpg.GPGKeychain.plist
~/Library/Application Support/Adium 2.0
~/Library/Application Support/Camino

Removing all those did not fix it.

When I log in as the admin, all the programs still work and I can create a GPG key in GPG Keychain Access.

I created a new regular user account and logged in as that account. Everything works (including creating the GPG key).

I do not know what else I can do. Please give me some ideas. I do not want to simply move everything to the new account because I would like to know what is the cause so I can fix/prevent in the future.

If needed, I can post the GPG Keychain Access and Camino crash log. I can't for Adium because it did not create one.

Some other info:
-> I have successfully created a GPG key in the command line using gpg --gen-key and can see the keys in GPG Keychain Access (which does not crash anymore because I am not clicking on Generate).
-> I am not using fink (I know that gpg has special install instructions when installed through fink).

Thanks for you help.

Based on advise from someone, I removed various files and found that if I remove:
~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/AddressBook.data
it solves the problem.

I had not even noticed, but my Address Book also crashed upon opening it. By removing this file, I lost all my contact (not a big deal as it was a new mac and only had test contacts in there).

Can anyone tell me how something like this happens?
As I said originally, I am new to Macs, so I am just wondering if things like this happen often in the mac world.

Welcome to Mac-Forums, helpmhost!

Nope I never had problems like that. Looks like something corrupted those files, most likely the last software you talk about i.e. macgpg and mac GPG Keychain Access.

To me, the important thing here is that you found the solution to your problem, which was the removal of the ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/AddressBook.data file.

Who could have connected that file to the issues you were having with MacGPG, Adium and Camino....certainly not I.

It can be quite difficult to explain why things happen in a certain order or what is the cause of a certain issue but I think you should know that your post might help someone in the future who is having trouble trying to sort out a similiar issue.

Sometimes the strangest solution works, there's no explanation.

From your 1st post in this thread I can see that you like to get under the bonnet for a peek around and as a result are learning quite a bit about your Mac.

Hopefully you will stick around and continue to learn and also help others here.