Safari / Mail / Disk Util Prefs corruption

[e-coli]

I have this issue, even after a completely clean install of Panther, where my Safari quits launching. It effects Mail and Disk Utility as well. They simply won't launch. So then I have to boot from the CD, and run all the disk utility apps, at which time the apps will work fine...for a while. Then it happens again.

So I have to re-install the entire OS.

Anyone have any ideas what the problem is?

 

[wrldwzrd89]

I have this issue, even after a completely clean install of Panther, where my Safari quits launching. It effects Mail and Disk Utility as well. They simply won't launch. So then I have to boot from the CD, and run all the disk utility apps, at which time the apps will work fine...for a while. Then it happens again.

So I have to re-install the entire OS.

Anyone have any ideas what the problem is?

Are you backing up your user preferences before you reinstall, and restoring them after? If you are, try not backing up (or not restoring, or deleting after restoring) the preference files for those applications as well as any common prefs the three apps share (I don't know what these are; just use your intuition to guess which ones might be causing the problem) before you reinstall again, or simply deleting/moving the offending preference files, logging out, then logging back in for the change to take effect. I once had a problem where all my applications were acting strangely - the only way to fix it was to restore a previous known good preferences set from a backup (a reinstall did NOT cure the problem, nor did removing all the preference files, logging out, then back in).