[asxless]

My neighbor's iMac G4 running Tiger developed an interesting problem after a power outage last night....

The windows of ALL Cocoa apps are black. Even the color picker only shows black despite moving the sliders etc. BUT the Carbon Apps work normally. Yes, even the Finder, except some icons are glitched but still recognizable.

What file(s) could have been corrupted by the power outage to whack the color in all of the Cocoa apps? And what is the best way to get her iMac back working?

TIA - asxless in iLand

[CharlesS]

Have you tried running DiskWarrior yet?

If you create a new user in the Accounts preference pane, does the problem occur for that user as well, or only for your main user account?

[msuper69]

System Preferences/Universal Access/Display has not been switched to White on Black/Use grayscale has it?

[asxless]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

Have you tried running DiskWarrior yet?

No. I don't have DiskWarrior and neither does she.

If you create a new user in the Accounts preference pane, does the problem occur for that user as well, or only for your main user account?

Yes. I created a new user and the problem is identical for that user. This is why I _believe_ it is a "system issue" not a user or application prefererence etc.

-- asxless

[asxless]

Originally Posted by msuper69 

System Preferences/Universal Access/Display has not been switched to White on Black/Use grayscale has it?

I'll ask her to check that.

FWIW when I check that on my Mac the window background goes black (like hers) but I still see white text. The windows for all of her Cocoa apps are solid black except for images which look normal. For example going to Apple in Safari produces an almost normal looking web page because it is mostly contructed of images. But the text parts are just black on black.

-- asxless

[asxless]

Thanks to all.

What we did...
1 - checked System>Preferences>Universial Access. Toggled settings (on/off) which had no effect on the problem.

2 - reset PRAM which produced no change in the color problem.

3- used Disk Untility>First Aid the verify the boot volume. It found errors so we booted from the Tiger Install DVD to run Disk Utility and repair the boot volume. This did not correct the problem but ti did fix something that was broken

4 - dropped back and punted
We re-installed Tiger (archive and install) which did fix the Cocoa color problem But left her with lots of updates to install, settings to correct, etc.

-- asxless in iLand

[goMac]

Cocoa actually has a colors file which could have gotten corrupted. I forget where the file is though.