Strange colours in Tiger - help!

[JoeUK]

I've just achived and installed Tiger, from 10.3.9, on my Mac Mini, and everything seems to be working fine, apart from a few things that have their colours totally wrong. The Finder dock icon is purple, the dashboard dock icon has a green hand, instead of red, all the dashboard widgets (apart from the iTunes, stickies and address book ones) are strange colours, pretty much all of Adium is coloured wrong, and lastly, in Finder, when I select something from the sidebar, instead of being blue, it's purple, like the dock icon.
This is really annoying, and anyone can help, I'd be veeery grateful indeed.
I've searched the forum and couldn't find anything, by the way.

 

[russed]

first off. have you tried repairing permissions. if you dont know how to go into applications > utilities > disk utility > repair permissions.

if you have any 'flaky' behaviour, this is the first thing you should do.

 

[JoeUK]

Yeah I did that straight away. I've also tried logging out/in, restarting and shutting down/starting up again.
I have no idea if this might help, but if I relaunch Finder (with option-command-esc, or whatever it's called), the dock icon goes it's normal blue self..

 

[mad jew]

I doubt this is the cause of your problem, but some people reported a while ago that if the monitor wasn't plugged into the mini properly, they'd get some weird colouring. I'm pretty sure it tinged the whole screen blue though, rather than just changing some select colouring. Still, it might be worthwhile making sure the plug hasn't been knocked out.

Jam it in hard baby!


Otherwise, can I recommend a clean install of the system? It might be a bit drastic though, do the permission repairing first.

 

[russed]

well that sounds like there is a problem with finder then!

whenever i had problems with finder in 10.3 i used to use onyx to clear the finder preferences but i dont think it is quaranteed to work with tiger so i dont know! maybe someone else around here iwll be more knowlegable than me on how to manually trash the finder settings etc - right hte finder preference file is in hd > library > preferences > and its somewhere in there called something like com.apple.finder.plist i dont know what deleating that will do but if you are desperate it could be worth a try!

 

[JoeUK]

well that sounds like there is a problem with finder then!

whenever i had problems with finder in 10.3 i used to use onyx to clear the finder preferences but i dont think it is quaranteed to work with tiger so i dont know! maybe someone else around here iwll be more knowlegable than me on how to manually trash the finder settings etc - right hte finder preference file is in hd > library > preferences > and its somewhere in there called something like com.apple.finder.plist i dont know what deleating that will do but if you are desperate it could be worth a try!

Sadly Onyx doesn't work on Tiger, and I'm too scared to do any deleting when I don't know exactly what it is. If I get really desperate, I'll try it.

I've tried replugging in the cables etc., no luck.
Again, if I get desperate I'll definitely do a clean install. That's pretty much guaranteed to work isn't it?

Thanks the suggestions anywho, chaps.

Edit: ah, this forum confuses me with it's levels of posts..

 

[russed]

probably wise not using onyx (though i was using the version of onyx that was intended for 10.2 on 10.3 for a while). though i suppose if you are getting to the point of doing a clean install, you really have nothing to lose by trying onyx, what ever you do make sure you have a back up!!!

 

[baummer]

Go into your System Preferences, go to Display, and make sure you're utilizing the most amount of colors you can. This might fix your problem.

 

[mbamac]

I've tried to install this widget and I've only downloaded it.

It was very simple: I always do not allow Safari to open "safe" files after downloading.

 

[JoeUK]

Go into your System Preferences, go to Display, and make sure you're utilizing the most amount of colors you can. This might fix your problem.

'Fraid I'm already using 'millions', which is the top setting. I also tried calibrating the colour profile, but that didn't do anything. I'm pretty sure it's not really to do with the real colour output, more to do with what colours certain things are displaying. I'm not sure if that quite makes sense, but hopefully someone knows what I mean..

 

[TheT]

'Fraid I'm already using 'millions', which is the top setting. I also tried calibrating the colour profile, but that didn't do anything. I'm pretty sure it's not really to do with the real colour output, more to do with what colours certain things are displaying. I'm not sure if that quite makes sense, but hopefully someone knows what I mean..

Try creating another user and see have a look at that dock icon. How did you install Tiger? Did you do an "Archive & Install"?
I had the exact same problem, it was my calibrated color profile... everytime I used it, every blue was suddenly purple, even after I subsequently selected another profile...

 

[JoeUK]

Try creating another user and see have a look at that dock icon. How did you install Tiger? Did you do an "Archive & Install"?
I had the exact same problem, it was my calibrated color profile... everytime I used it, every blue was suddenly purple, even after I subsequently selected another profile...

I actually tried this last night, before I read your post, but it worked, so thanks a lot anyway
At first my new account had the selected items in Finder purple rather than blue, but after relaunching it, everything's now fine!
Thanks everyone for any suggestions.