I was going to query the forums on this one, it had me up late last night, and baffled for most of this morning. But due to the suggestion of a friend I have found the solution and thought it might be beneficial for others who might have similar issues, or any that might come up in the future.
For those not interested in the long version, here's the basic gist, Safari hung on launch for a particular username, standard fixes didn't word (permissions, pref deletion, etc). Downloading and launching Webkit, seemed to repair whatever was broken.
And for those interested in the longer explanation keep reading.
Playing around on my nearly 5 year old PB G4 last night it shut itself down for no discernible reason. Upon reboot my system clock thought it was December 31, 1969 which wrecked havoc with a lot of applications. Once the clock was fixed everything seemed to work fine, other than Safari which would beachball on launch and refuse to display anything (homepage was news.google.com so I was fairly certain that it wasn't the site). Firefox worked fine and Safari worked fine in my admin account, so I started to play around.
I deleted pref files one at a time to see if Safari would come back after any of them, no use. Repaired disk permissions, no use. Booted to single user and ran /sbin/fsck -fy, no use.
After playing around some more and getting nowhere fast, I started to use the sledgehammer. Spotlight search in the Library folder for anything containing "safari" copy it all to the trash, removed all plugins, cookies, downloaded and ran OnyX. Nothing would work.
This morning my friend suggested downloading Webkit as an alternative. So I did, since it uses most of the same information as Safari it would be an easy transition (had I not already trashed most of the preference files) but at this point it was going to be a transition no matter what so what could it hurt?
After running Webkit, I thought, well, if it uses the same files, maybe it somehow repaired whichever file I didn't find that was causing the problem. Wouldn't you know it, Safari worked fine. I managed to salvage my bookmarks and history from the trash before emptying, and will have to reinstall plugins as needed, but all-in-all it won't be nearly as bad as it could have been.
Anyone having or seeing someone with similar issues might want to give the Webkit trick a shot (preferably before deleting all of the pref files) and you might save someone a lot of hassle in the future.
For those not interested in the long version, here's the basic gist, Safari hung on launch for a particular username, standard fixes didn't word (permissions, pref deletion, etc). Downloading and launching Webkit, seemed to repair whatever was broken.
And for those interested in the longer explanation keep reading.
Playing around on my nearly 5 year old PB G4 last night it shut itself down for no discernible reason. Upon reboot my system clock thought it was December 31, 1969 which wrecked havoc with a lot of applications. Once the clock was fixed everything seemed to work fine, other than Safari which would beachball on launch and refuse to display anything (homepage was news.google.com so I was fairly certain that it wasn't the site). Firefox worked fine and Safari worked fine in my admin account, so I started to play around.
I deleted pref files one at a time to see if Safari would come back after any of them, no use. Repaired disk permissions, no use. Booted to single user and ran /sbin/fsck -fy, no use.
After playing around some more and getting nowhere fast, I started to use the sledgehammer. Spotlight search in the Library folder for anything containing "safari" copy it all to the trash, removed all plugins, cookies, downloaded and ran OnyX. Nothing would work.
This morning my friend suggested downloading Webkit as an alternative. So I did, since it uses most of the same information as Safari it would be an easy transition (had I not already trashed most of the preference files) but at this point it was going to be a transition no matter what so what could it hurt?
After running Webkit, I thought, well, if it uses the same files, maybe it somehow repaired whichever file I didn't find that was causing the problem. Wouldn't you know it, Safari worked fine. I managed to salvage my bookmarks and history from the trash before emptying, and will have to reinstall plugins as needed, but all-in-all it won't be nearly as bad as it could have been.
Anyone having or seeing someone with similar issues might want to give the Webkit trick a shot (preferably before deleting all of the pref files) and you might save someone a lot of hassle in the future.