Finder Help has disappeared

[chris curran]

I am fairly new at macs. We have a mac osx panther. In the last couple of days when you are in Finder & you click on Help it appears blank. you can type in a question but nothing happpens. Any ideas what I've done or more particularly how to fix it?
thanks

[HexMonkey]

This is a fairly common problem. Deleting the following files (where ~ is your home folder) should fix it.


~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.help.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.helpui.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.helpviewer.plist
~/Library/Caches/com.apple.helpui/

[chris curran]

Thanks HexMonkey, what a talent you are. Thanks for taking the time to reply. I did the first of your three suggestions, but I was a bit nervous about the last as there was a lot of stuff there. I went back to finder help & voila it was back.
If you are briefly able to tell me what I might have done so I don't do the same thing would be appreciated. I had installed Limewire and was playing some music. I noticed your suggestions has plist at the end.
thanks again :D

[HexMonkey]

I don't think there is a specific cause. The files I mentioned just seem to get corrupted occasionally, which stops Help Viewer from working properly. Hopefully Apple will fix the bugs that cause it soon.