Address book problems

Hi Everyone,

I am having a problem with my Address Book. For some reason it has started hanging when I try to open it. The icon in the dock has the little pointy arrow beneath it but the address book doesn't open. The icon doesn't bounce and there is no spinning disk. I tried starting up from my back-up system and the address book on that works just fine. If I restart from my back-up and run Disk Warrior on my main disk, repair permissions and the restart from the renovated disk mostly the address book starts and works just as normal. The next time I start up sometimes it is there and sometimes not.

The first thing I did to try to rectify the problem was to dump the prefs file (com.apple.AddressBook.plist.) Although the address book opened as it should there were no addresses in it. The card list was intact but there was nothing on any of the cards. So, obviously that was a non-runner. The next thing I tried was cloning my back-up system to the main disk (using Carbon Copy Cloner) and that sorted the problem for a while. But it only lasted two start-ups.

I am posting here to see if anyone has any bright ideas before my next move. That is to reinstall the address book using Pacifist to get the address book out of the pkg container on my system disks. However, I am a little hesitant about doing this because I do not want to lose all my addresses. Can anyone tell me what effect this might have and what, if anything I can do about it.

Indeed, any suggestions, advice, cautions or ideas regarding other ways to rectify this problem would be welcomed.

Thank you for reading this post.

David

What version of OS X are you using?

StretchR said:

What version of OS X are you using?

Click to expand...

10.3.9.

Probably the pref file contains the data somehow? If you are in Panther, I would first run Apple's Disk Utility from the Utilities folder (for Panther it is best to run it directly from the hard drive than from the CD... has something to do with the BOM file that resides in the CD compared to the one that is in the hard drive) and then make it repair disk permissions.

If you haven't emptied the trash with the pref file, I would restart and then put it back in its proper place if the repair disk permissions task didn't bring the data back in your Address Book.

Edited to add:

DOH! You already have tried repairing disk permissions I see... Ok did you run OnyX to clear up your user cache?

MacHeadCase said:

Probably the pref file contains the data somehow? If you are in Panther, I would first run Apple's Disk Utility from the Utilities folder (for Panther it is best to run it directly from the hard drive than from the CD... has something to do with the BOM file that resides in the CD compared to the one that is in the hard drive) and then make it repair disk permissions.

If you haven't emptied the trash with the pref file, I would restart and then put it back in its proper place if the repair disk permissions task didn't bring the data back in your Address Book.

Edited to add:

DOH! You already have tried repairing disk permissions I see... Ok did you run OnyX to clear up your user cache?

Click to expand...

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. I have used Main Menu a couple of times running all the scripts. That includes clearing my user cache. It also includes permissions but I also use Disk Utility for that. Nothing seems to make a difference.

Although I have dumped the removed pref file (surely, if it is in the trash the application is still going to refer to it?) I did try copying the prefs file from my back-up system to the main one. However, that didn't work.

This problem finally got the best of me yesterday evening, which is when I made my original post. Since then I have done all the things that usually (but not always) get my address book back but to no avail.

I am kinda running out of things to try but using Pacifist seems a bit radical.

Please, anyone who has any suggestions, do post a reply.

Thank again.

David

Hi Everyone,

I have revived this thread because I have solved my address book problem and I thought that it might be helpful or interesting or something to other members to know how.

Although the advice and help I got from this forum was really appreciated (thank you very much guys,) I didn't feel that I was getting to the cause of the problem. Therefore, I copied my original post from here and posted it on the MacFixItForums.

Almost the first thing I got asked by those who responded was had I installed any programs that made system-wide changes on my machine. And, Indeed, as I have just installed a new HD I had been doing a lot of downloading. The next question was were there any haxies among the programs I downloaded. Among the stuff I downloaded were MainMenu, WindowShade and Adium. Although MainMenu doesn't seem to be a haxie, it does put an icon in the Finder Menu Bar and that is a root function. Along with these came a couple of support applications -- Growl (with Adium) and APE (Application Program Enhancer) with WindowShade. I didn't like Adium so I dumped that but Growl stayed around. I kept WindowShade and APE.

Although, as here, I mentioned reinstalling the Address Book application using Pacifist, no one thought that would be necessary.

I did a bit of web research into haxies and found a couple of pages that fairly critical of their effects and talked specifically about problems being caused by APE and WindowShade.

This morning when I started-up my address book was not functioning again so I dumped WindowShade, APE and Growl. And just for good measure I also dumped MainMenu. (Although I liked it I have heard such good things about Onyx that I am going to download that.) When I restarted after my big dumperoo, my address book was back and it has stayed back through a couple of (test) restarts.

So that was the cause -- haxies. I know that tons of you use Adium and other stuff that involve havies without any problems. And I am very pleased for you. But no two computers are the same. What causes a problem on my machine may work wonderfully well on your machine. So these are not words of warning but words of mild caution.

I hope they will be of some help to someone.

David

Thanks for the detailed help in solving this problem, David and glad it has been sorted out.

That's one of the reasons I never use haxies. I had in my early Panther days (can't remember which haxie it was now) and it messed up Safari pretty bad.

You can always try to download again MainMenu if you feel like it: I use it every day and nothing bad has happened to my iMac. But OnyX does indeed do everything MainMenu does.