Help With Help!

[Jstein]

Hello Everyone,
I hope that someone can help me out with this. On Friday I wanted to access the Help feature in the finder menu and it crashed. This never happen before and since then the problem has not stop. Now I have rarely used the Help feature in Mac OS X so I do not know if this something that happens most of the time or what. My question is, can I do anything to prevent my Help feature from crashing?

 

[Doctor Q]

For starters, you could try deleting this folder:

/User/yourname/Library/Caches/com.apple.helpui

and these files:

/User/yourname/Library/Preferences/com.apple.help.plist
/User/yourname/Library/Preferences/com.apple.helpui.plist
/User/yourname/Library/Preferences/com.apple.helpviewer.plist

If your Mac is set up with more than one user, tell us if the problem happens to all users or just to you.

 

[Jstein]

The Doctor has spoken, thanks for the tip everything seems to be working fine now. Two things, one is what actually led to the Help feature going haywire? Two, no one else uses my powerbook but me, if was quite investment for a young guy like me, so I am not in the position to share the wealth yet!.......

 

[Doctor Q]

The Doctor has spoken, thanks for the tip everything seems to be working fine now. Two things, one is what actually led to the Help feature going haywire?

Software bugs. People like me (who write software for a living) make our share of mistakes, and you suffer the consequences. The highly technical explanation is that the Help application, or maybe the Finder, did something stupid and stepped on itself.

Two, no one else uses my powerbook but me, if was quite investment for a young guy like me, so I am not in the position to share the wealth yet!.......

The other user of your PowerBook doesn't have to be somebody else - just another login ID you've defined in the Accounts preference pane. It's actually handy to define an alter ego for exactly this kind of diagnosis. If a problem is system-wide, deleting files in one user's Library folder won't help. If the problem is specific to one user, it IS one possible solution.