System preferences not responding

[excalibur313]

I have a 1st gen macbook pro and I've been running into issues recently where system preferences won't load. It bounces on the dock for a while but then nothing shows up. When I go to activity monitor system preferences is running but it says that it isn't responding. Given that this is such a central program to the OS, how can I go about diagnosing and fixing this issue?

Thanks!

 

[mrsir2009]

Try reseting the PRAM. If that doesn't work try opening it from the applications folder.

When did the problem start happening?

 

[spaceballl]

I had that issue yesterday - I upgraded my parents' iMac to Snow Leopard, and I got that issue after my first boot. Have you updated to 10.6.1? That fixed it for me.

 

[excalibur313]

Hi Everyone,
Thanks a lot for all the responses. It turns out that I had updated to the latest version of snow leopard and my problems started happening shortly thereafter. I can't confirm that it was due to the upgrade though. I was able to load system preferences clicking on the icon in applications but it didn't work on the dock or by going to the apple menu. This seems pretty weird to me but I was able to resolve it after I tried resetting the PRAM and that worked.

Thanks again!

 

[gasyfarty]

I know to to fix system preferences

Hey I'm only a newbie but I had the same problem yesterday with my wallpaper preference pane because I had the spinning wheel of doom and my desktop when fully blue without my permission and I was fiddling around in my pictures folder seeing if any of my pictures had a virus I accidentally moved my photo booth library and iPhoto library from my pictures folder to a different location and put them back and my system preferences let me in and didn't goto the spinning wheel of doom and I tried to change my desktop and it worked the where all back to normal and it was fixed.

Hope yo have the same luck as me and this method works for you.