[MrForgetable]

I press Apple+?, and Help launches, the window shows up, the dock icon shows up, then it just force quits itself or something right after it launches. Help works for programs (Safari, iTunes, Word, etc.), but not Finder.

Do I need to repair permissions or something? I am probably classified as a Mac OS newbie so Help would be nice to access for those things

[CharlesS]

Go in your home folder, then to Library/Caches. Delete the folder called com.apple.helpui and see if that helps.

[MrForgetable]

Thanks. It worked Can you explain what that did?

[bma_mat99]

what that did is quite simple. For some reason, a preference of finder was telling iteself something that was making iteself force quit. by deleting this preference, and launching finder, finder just made a new preference (completely new, as if you just started using finder for the first time), so it worked fine... you will see that this works for most applications that are not working correctly.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by bma_mat99:
what that did is quite simple. For some reason, a preference of finder was telling iteself something that was making iteself force quit. by deleting this preference, and launching finder, finder just made a new preference (completely new, as if you just started using finder for the first time), so it worked fine... you will see that this works for most applications that are not working correctly.

Whew, if I was a newbie to OS X, this paragraph would have confused the hell out of me.

Here's what's actually going on: The Help Viewer app caches help files when you read them, in order to be able to load them more quickly the next time. Somehow, the Help Viewer's cache for the Mac Help got corrupted badly enough that the Help Viewer was choking when trying to read the bad cache files. Deleting the cache caused it to make a new one from scratch.

In general, Mac OS X regenerates files that are automatically generated if you delete them, as it should be. For this reason, if a cache or preference file gets corrupted, you can just trash it and a new one will get created which is clean and new.

[MrForgetable]

thanks. it makes sense now. i love this OS. it is simple, yet complicated (maybe too much so !! )

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by MrForgetable:
thanks. it makes sense now. i love this OS. it is simple, yet complicated (maybe too much so !! )

Complicated? On Windows, fixing the same problem would probably have involved registry surgery.

[MrForgetable]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
Complicated? On Windows, fixing the same problem would probably have involved registry surgery.

i was talking about the Unix core (Terminal, etc)