Hello everyone,
I'm having some problems with the Dashboard. I don't recall having these issues with 10.6.0; I don't know if they happened immediately following an update to 10.6.1. I noticed the issue immediately after installing an updated widget, Delivery Status, but to be honest I can't say whether that was exactly when the problematic behavior started or whether it was the first time in a while that I attempted to access a widget's preference pane.
I've Googled around and searched these forums. The common advice is to delete com.apple.dashboard.plist (and com.apple.dashboard.client.plist, for good measure) from your user/library/preferences folder. I did both, and while my Dashboard reset to what it looks like on a fresh system, the problem persisted.
Here's the problem: clicking on the "i" on any widget that offers it does nothing. Ordinarily the widget would flip around and offer you some preferences when that's clicked. Some other behaviors that may be worth noting:
If the "i" is clicked, clicking and dragging the widget will cause the widget to "jump" such that the widget is being dragged by the area where the "i" is located. For example, on the weather widget, the "i" is located on the lower right; if I click it, then move my mouse and begin clicking and dragging that widget from the upper left corner, the widget will jump such that suddenly the lower right hand corner is where the pointer is.
Ordinarily, clicking on a non-widget will cause the Dashboard to disappear. If a widget's "i" is clicked, non-widget space must be clicked twice in order for the Dashboard to disappear.
No errors are visible in the Console. If I log in to my Administrator account, the Dashboard works perfectly fine; this problem seems limited to my Standard (and regularly-used) account.
Possible solutions I've tried:
1) Deleting the dashboard and dashboard.client plists from both my standard and administrator accounts. I deleted the files on one account and, without opening the dashboard, logged out, deleted them from the other, logged out, and logged back in to my regular account. The problem was not fixed.
2) Using the utility "Yasu" to clear all system caches. This didn't have an effect.
3) I booted from the Snow Leopard DVD and reinstalled Snow Leopard. While the installer took a while, I don't know exactly what files it replaced - the system still claimed it was at 10.6.1 (which is expected, based on Apple's advertised new features for Snow Leopard). More importantly, it didn't fix the problem at all.
4) Of course, I've tried permissions repairs multiple times and it had no effect.
This issue makes the dashboard much less useful. I'm very close to last-resort measures of formatting the system drive and then reinstalling fresh. (That sounds worse than it is - assuming my Time Machine volume doesn't suffer a problem, recovering all of my settings and files is done easily and painlessly enough. What a fantastic feature, although if the problem restores along with it...) Given that it only affects on user account and not another, it seems like there's something specific...
Does anyone have any ideas for how I can fix this, short of reinstalling the whole system?
I am using OS X 10.6.1 (upgraded from 10.5.8 to 10.6.0, then updated to 10.6.1) on a Macbook Pro 4,1.
Thank you for reading and for any suggestions you may have!
I'm having some problems with the Dashboard. I don't recall having these issues with 10.6.0; I don't know if they happened immediately following an update to 10.6.1. I noticed the issue immediately after installing an updated widget, Delivery Status, but to be honest I can't say whether that was exactly when the problematic behavior started or whether it was the first time in a while that I attempted to access a widget's preference pane.
I've Googled around and searched these forums. The common advice is to delete com.apple.dashboard.plist (and com.apple.dashboard.client.plist, for good measure) from your user/library/preferences folder. I did both, and while my Dashboard reset to what it looks like on a fresh system, the problem persisted.
Here's the problem: clicking on the "i" on any widget that offers it does nothing. Ordinarily the widget would flip around and offer you some preferences when that's clicked. Some other behaviors that may be worth noting:
If the "i" is clicked, clicking and dragging the widget will cause the widget to "jump" such that the widget is being dragged by the area where the "i" is located. For example, on the weather widget, the "i" is located on the lower right; if I click it, then move my mouse and begin clicking and dragging that widget from the upper left corner, the widget will jump such that suddenly the lower right hand corner is where the pointer is.
Ordinarily, clicking on a non-widget will cause the Dashboard to disappear. If a widget's "i" is clicked, non-widget space must be clicked twice in order for the Dashboard to disappear.
No errors are visible in the Console. If I log in to my Administrator account, the Dashboard works perfectly fine; this problem seems limited to my Standard (and regularly-used) account.
Possible solutions I've tried:
1) Deleting the dashboard and dashboard.client plists from both my standard and administrator accounts. I deleted the files on one account and, without opening the dashboard, logged out, deleted them from the other, logged out, and logged back in to my regular account. The problem was not fixed.
2) Using the utility "Yasu" to clear all system caches. This didn't have an effect.
3) I booted from the Snow Leopard DVD and reinstalled Snow Leopard. While the installer took a while, I don't know exactly what files it replaced - the system still claimed it was at 10.6.1 (which is expected, based on Apple's advertised new features for Snow Leopard). More importantly, it didn't fix the problem at all.
4) Of course, I've tried permissions repairs multiple times and it had no effect.
This issue makes the dashboard much less useful. I'm very close to last-resort measures of formatting the system drive and then reinstalling fresh. (That sounds worse than it is - assuming my Time Machine volume doesn't suffer a problem, recovering all of my settings and files is done easily and painlessly enough. What a fantastic feature, although if the problem restores along with it...) Given that it only affects on user account and not another, it seems like there's something specific...
Does anyone have any ideas for how I can fix this, short of reinstalling the whole system?
I am using OS X 10.6.1 (upgraded from 10.5.8 to 10.6.0, then updated to 10.6.1) on a Macbook Pro 4,1.
Thank you for reading and for any suggestions you may have!
