Address Book problems

[kristopher902]

I have an eMac 1GHz with a Superdrive and 512MB RAM. There are 2 users set up on the computer: myself and another for the rest of my family. My account runs fine. Everything works perfectly. However, after I installed OS X 10.3.3, the other account's Address Book stopped working. Whenever I try to open it the icon bounces but the window never comes up. When I right-click on the icon it says that the Application is not responding. I'm not sure if this was caused by installing 10.3.3 but it is very important since there are numerous contacts in the Address Book that my family needs. If anyone has any idea what could be wrong or what to do...please help! I can usually figure out problems on my Mac but this one has totally stumped me. Thanks.

Kristopher

 

[HexMonkey]

First try repairing permissions in Disk Utility if you haven't already. Secondly, move [Family user]/Library/Preferences/com.apple.AddressBook.plist and see if that helps (if it doesn't you can move it back).

If that fails, go to [Family user]/Library/Application Support/ and move the AddressBook folder. This is the folder that contains the contacts. If Address Book opens after moving this, it may mean that the data is corrupt (so hopefully this isn't the source the problem). If this is the source, copy the folder back to Application Support and use trial and error to find the corrupt file by moving files out of the folder one at a time.

If the AddressBook folder is not corrupt, then you could use trial and error throughout the whole of the user's Library folder (the problem is probably in Preferences, but it could be anywhere), or as a last result you could create a new user and copy this folder, all documents (every folder except Library), as well as various other things from the user's Library folder (but be warned, something in there is likely to be the source of the problem).