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Disappearing applications?! What the...

themightyspitz

themightyspitz

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 16, 2007
134
0
Baltimore, MD
About 3 weeks ago, I went out of town for a week then came back. When I started up my PPC G5 iMac, I went to open Safari....but it disappeared. The icon was still in the dock, but when I clicked on it, a translucent "?" showed up over it. I tried a Spotlight search for it, and nothing came up. Same thing happened with Preview. I thought my Aunt who was staying over didn't know how to use the Mac and might have accidentally deleted them, so I used Pacifist to reinstall Safari and Preview from the Leopard disc. No big deal.

Then today, I fire up Word, but same thing! Word disappeared! Same with Excel. No matter, reinstalled from the disc. After a couple of hours, I'm back again and this time I want to use Roxio Toast....gone. And this time, I don't have any install disc (lost it during moving). And I know my Aunt can't be responsible for Toast or Word disappearing, since she left yesterday afternoon; mom was using Word on my computer and I used Toast no more than 5 days ago.

So anyone have any clue what the heck is going on with my applications literally deleting themselves?
 
Are the apps truly gone or is the link just broken to the Dock?
Did you look in the applications folder?

Sorry if that sounds too simple, but your post did not specify if you had done this.

Woof, Woof - Dawg
pawprint.gif
 
Try a spotlight search for the applications. If for some reason your applications folder was moved (or the application was moved) the alias in the dock won't be able to locate it and it will appear as if the application was deleted.
 
I spotlight searched for them, and they were truly gone.

Toast is the even more interesting thing. When I installed it, I dumped the whole folder in there, and always accessed it from there. So if I weren't to use the dock, I would have to go Finder -> Applications -> Roxio Toast 6 Titanium -> Toast.app. But it's gone. The folder it stayed in was still there, as was everything else, but the app is gone.
 
Pulled this post from another thread about a similar problem. It may have some value for you:
mad jew said:
Use Disk Utility to verify your drive. Also, how much free space do you have on your boot drive? Have you renamed any system folders? :)
Click to expand...


For what it's worth, it appears as if the other user solved the problem by an Archive & Install.
 
EricNau said:
Pulled this post from another thread about a similar problem. It may have some value for you:



For what it's worth, it appears as if the other user solved the problem by an Archive & Install.
Click to expand...
That could be why...This thing is running Leopard, but I selected the Upgrade option way back when. Been meaning to do either an Erase & Install or Archive & Install for a while. Things went funky on my Macbook when I Upgraded, and after an Erase & Install, it's been perfect. On this iMac, I have about 160 gigs of free space.

Thanks.
 
Applications have disappeared

Help - new Mac user
Two applications have completely disappeared from my 2007 Mac Book 4.1 (OSX 10.5.5)
iPhoto and iPages are gone. I have searched all of my folders to no avail. iPhoto went first about 3 weeks ago and today iPages.
What would cause this and where are they now?
 
Disappearing Applications

So to add my story to the ever-growing forums on this topic (I will be publishing the same text to a few other places, in the hopes Apple will post a response!)...

In our case we have 5 computers and printer on a wired network. One employee was trying to print out of InDesign CS3, and print failed. Looked in the print tray and found it had printed a "Network Configuration" sheet because it had lost the link to the network. So we of course tried to see why printer wasn't working, which is when an employee notice the question marks on some dock apps. Upon inspection of the application folder, she found ALL Adobe CS3 apps were gone, as well as Firefox and Excel. Of course we were freaked out and upon further inspection we found (as others seem to have also found) that all files accessed that day (about 14 files, Excel, Illustrator & InDesign files) were also GONE. The only other odd thing was that there were a couple folders called "Recovered Files", one on desktop and one in Trash, but upon restart, theses disappeared and what was left in Trash were about 27 files from the previous week.

We were able to restore most items via Time Machine, but as everyone has mentioned, we NEED to know WHY this happened and how to prevent it happening again. And for the record, we have NOT recently run any Apple updates. PLEASE if anyone has figured it out, let us all know. And if not, please mention what you were doing at the time or shortly before you noticed the problem. Many people have said it "sounds like a virus" but if you search this, you'll find that there are no known viruses of this sort targeting Macs.
 
Sorry to revive an old post, but...

I just took a look at a MBP of a coworkers who's been having similar problems. She had Microsoft Word, Excel, Google Earth and Google Chrome all disappear on her. The icons on the dock had been overwritten with question marks and a search with spotlight couldn't find them. Her kids have accounts on the computer, so we searched all of their home folders but didn't find anything. Even though it wasn't going to solve the problem, I did do some basic maintenance for her (repairing permissions, etc.) since I don't think that's ever been done. Of course she doesn't have any type of backup protocol in place, and she doesn't think she still has her copy of Office.

My guess is that someone (probably her kids) deleted the apps. I've never seen programs spontaneously uninstall themselves and in spite of another coworkers suggestion that "it's a virus" we know that isn't true.
 
Me too. Word application has VANISHED.

Not in the application folder. Gone. Vamoose.
It troubles me because I just set up these online drop sites for photos from the public, but that's crazy talk, right?

WHAT A DRAG!
:(
 
biologykid said:
Not in the application folder. Gone. Vamoose.
It troubles me because I just set up these online drop sites for photos from the public, but that's crazy talk, right?

WHAT A DRAG!
:(
Click to expand...
Did you look in the Microsoft Office folder inside the Applications folder? Also, are you looking in Finder, or on the Dock? Did you search for Word.app?
 
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