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neffedo

macrumors member
Original poster
I'm having a bit of a problem with Mac Help! In the finder menu bar, when I click on Mac Help (under Help) it won't load. Just a blank window comes up, but nothing else. Can anyone please tell me what the problem is? This happens when I click on Help in the System Preferences, too. How can I fix this?
 
This is quite a common bug, but it can usually be fixed by deleting the following:

  • Home/Library/Preferences/com.apple.help.plist
  • Home/Library/Preferences/com.apple.helpui.plist
  • Home/Library/Preferences/com.apple.helpviewer.plist
  • Home/Library/Caches/com.apple.helpui/
 
thanks!

yeah i just used this cocktail thing to clear up all caches on my system (never done it before). it works now!! 🙂
 
Helped, but not fully

Egads! Ok same thing happened to me today, and I did as HexMonkey instructed. After that, starting "Mac Help" did pull up the OS X help menu. But some of the links (a level or 2 down) resulted in "TopicListNoResults". For example, I choose For Windows switchers -> Useful keyboard shortcuts -> More about shortcuts, then I end up getting that "TopicListNoResults" message.

This happened with some other menu choices, too.

Can anyone shed light on what's going on? Why does HexMonkey's fix work? At the same time, why is it not fully solving my problem??

Oh yeah - I'd ask Apple Support on the phone, but the boogers are closed right now!
 
Ok - it looks like it's working

Ok - after rebooting like a few times for some other software installs and such, the Mac Help stuff seems to be functioning ok now. I hope it stays that way!! 😡

What was *that* all about??
 
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