"System Preferences Unexpectedly Quit..."

[Lincoln 6 Echo]

This started happening a few weeks ago when ever I right-click to "Change Desktop Background..." or go into the System Preferences window. In both cases, the 'Deskop & Screensaver' window is CRASHES (a.k.a "unexpectedly quits").

When I go with "Change Desktop Background..." System Preferences quits immediately. When I go through System Preferences --> Desktop & Screensaver, the Desktop & Screensaver window shows for a split second then it quits. This really is crappy & very annoying.

Can anyone shed some light on this and maybe how to fix it?

 

[iBlue]

sometimes it takes a while to load if you are choosing from a folder with a lot of images. is it giving you the beach ball or actually crashing? if so, are any other preferences doing this?

 

[Daveway]

repaired permissions?

 

[mkrishnan]

Two more possibilities....

1) A really nastily corrupt image file in your Pictures... that's causing a crash when Prefs tries to make the thumbnail

2) A corrupt plist file....particularly, perhaps com.apple.desktop.plist -- I don't think moving this out and then logging out/in would kill a lot of valuable settings.

 

[Lincoln 6 Echo]

Problem solved : )

Thanks for the suggestions. I tried repairing permissions this morning before posting my prob. and was optimistic/happy to see that many permissions were out of whack, but after all was repaired and verified I still had my System Preferences problem. It would beach ball for a second then UE.

So about an hour ago I decided to apply all of the latest Software Updates. I went from 10.3 to 10.3.9, and POOF no more System Pref. UE'ing. SO, if you're Sys. Prefs. UE when trying to change your desktop and your using 10.3, it looks like updating to 10.3.9 should help.

 

[mkrishnan]

Wow. Well, glad it worked out for you. 10.3.9 has been out for a looong time...just out of curiosity, what version of Panther have you been using before that time? You weren't using 10.3.0, were you?

 

[lunet59]

System Preferences unexpectedly quits after selecting "desktop and screensaver"

Hello---I too am having the same problem. After opening "desktop and screensaver" inside system preferences, it immediately quits and gives me the "system preferences has unexpectedly quit" message. I've tried opening system preferences both from my doc and from my applications folder, and I've also looked at the photos in the folder that it opens to see if there was a corrupted image in it causing a problem... nothing has seemed to work. I would love to get this fixed and get a new desktop picture too! THANKS.