Appleworks spinning beach ball

[gravyboat]

Appleworks 6 has gone wonky and any suggestions would be appreciated.

When I open a document, it opens but without text and the title is grayed out. After 5-7 seconds, the text and title appear but the beach ball starts going and I can't do anything except force quit.

This started after an odd incident yesterday. I was working on a document I'll call A. I've been editing this document for a long time. So the file is named A.cwk. I'm not sure how I closed or saved it, but it did not appear on my desktop as usual.

So I went to spotlight and searched for A.cwk and it turned up as a folder. What? The folder contains the Documents folder, and if I go Documents > Appleworks User Data > Starting Points > Recent Items, that's where the folder named A.cwk resides.

Also, this folder and all of the Appleworks documents in Recent Items have a small arrow on the bottom left corner of the icon.

I've run Disk Utility, Onyx, repaired permissions, and restarted. No help. And of course I can't find my install discs to reinstall Appleworks.

Is there anything I can try before turning the house upside down in search of those discs? Thanks so much for any help.

P.S. Just to clarify, all existing Appleworks documents open but get the beach ball.

 

[PeggyD]

You have been bitten by the Recent Items bug that has been around since AppleWorks 6 was released in March, 2000. Even if you have Recent Items checked to only remember the 10 most recent, AppleWorks does not do this & keeps an alias of every file ever opened. Check the Recent Items folder in HD/Users/username/Documents/AppleWorks User Data & trash the aliases there. AutoSave is another culprit & most users recommend turning both AutoSave & Recent Items off in Preferences.

 

[gravyboat]

Thank you so much PeggyD! You are a lifesaver. I deleted the aliases and it worked like a charm. Got my work in early (5 pm deadline) and everyone's happy.

You have no idea how much I appreciate this. Cheers!

 

[Gregg2]

My long term work around for this problem when I used AW was to create an alias of that Recent Items folder and leave it on my Desktop. I opened it and to set it to View by List, Arrange by Date, and clicked the "reverse" arrow to put the oldest ones at the top. Then whenever I was about to Empty the Trash, I opened that folder and got rid of a few off the top.