I lost Screen Saver in Preferences

I changed my screensaver while in iPhoto and it is scrolling through one picture "event". the option is in dropdown menu "Share".

Went to System Preferences to load Desktop and Screen Saver to undo and get back to the Apple standard desktop and "Desktop and Screen Saver" is not there. Tried to access it via help menu and got:

"The item cannot be opened. It may be disabled or not installed. 2 param error"

I can't find it using spotlight nor is the apple help web any assistance, since it just tells me to go to preferences and run a program i don't seem to have.

Anyone know how I can get the program back into preferences?

Have you tried spotlight to locate the folder?

Perhaps it has been moved to iPhoto as you were using that application at the time. Not a wise thing to do change System preferences whilst in an application.

harryb2448 said:

Have you tried spotlight to locate the folder?

Perhaps it has been moved to iPhoto as you were using that application at the time. Not a wise thing to do change System preferences whilst in an application.

Click to expand...

I tried Spotlight, but you can help if you know the name of the folder the program should be in, and/or the name of the actual program? Looking for "screen saver" does not produce any useable results.

Remember the Screen Saver program is NOT in my System Preferences and I was not trying to change it while in iPhoto. I changed it from the share dropdown menu IN iPhoto.

I'm running OS X Tiger 10.4.11 so if you're using OS X Leopard 10.5.x this could be different...

Normally the Screen Saver would be found in the PreferencesPanes and the path is this:

Macintosh HD -> System -> Library -> PreferencePanes folder. But...

Here's the trick, though. ScreenSaver.prefPane, in Tiger at least, is an alias and the original file points to DesktopScreenEffectsPref.prefPane. Make sure you have at least the original pref pane in there.

If the ScreenSaver.prefPane alias (or the original DesktopScreenEffectsPref.prefPane) isn't there, maybe pop in the restore disk from your iMac, download Pacifist and see if you can grab the one that is missing or both if both are missing.

To drop a file in your System's Library, you will be prompted to enter your admin password.

Report back to let us know how it goes. Good luck.

After checking all the system library backups and not finding desktopScreenEffectsPref.prefPane from the November 1 backup (first one i did after installing leopard) i called the Apple help desk. I ended up doing a archive and install after checking the disk for errors and insuring the permissions were all ok. 2 hours later the file was back.

Thank you for your assistance.

Well, I'm glad you got that problem solved!