Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

pendragon · May 22, 2007, 07:50 AM

On an Intel 24' iMac, 10.4.9

I have no Scroll Bar in Sound/Sound Effects. I can only select/change sounds by using the up & down arrow keys.

My scroll bars work fine everywhere else.

I have cleaned caches, ran all cron scripts, Repaired Permissions, ran DiskWarrior & TTP, Safe Booted, Zapped, shut down, and validated fonts, all to no avail.

So I created a new User and voila!, the scroll bar returned.

Ah, says I, must be some preference corruption or conflict.

So I then deleted com.apple.soundpref.plist and restarted, hoping that was the corrupt culprit. Arrgh, no joy.

FWIW, I have the same computer configuration (well, as close as I can make it) on a PPC machine and it does not have this issue.

'Tis hardly a problem in the grand scheme of things, but it does vex me. Might some clever chap or chapette have a suggestion or two? Even guesses most welcome.

TIA

TETENAL · May 22, 2007, 08:16 AM

Did you try trashing com.apple.systempreferences.plist?

pendragon · May 22, 2007, 10:05 AM

Tetenal, Many thanks for the great suggestion. I just tried that, but alas, no joy.

I remain confused and frustrated (though 'tis hardly foreign territory).

pendragon · May 23, 2007, 07:24 AM

A bit of progress has been made.

Apparently the issue is with TinkerTool 3.7.

It seems that it is only when I enable TT (General) "Place scroll arrows together at both ends", that no arrows are displayed in System Preferences/Sound/Sound Effects.

But if I select "Place scroll arrows at both ends", then the scroll arrows in Sound Effects appear normally.

I have repeated this test numerous times, always with the same result.

I have written to the TinkerTool developer (Dr. Marcel Bresink) and asked for his thoughts. When I hear from him, I'll post his comments.

TETENAL · May 23, 2007, 08:55 AM

I'm not saying the problem is not with TinkerTool (tinkering with disabled preferences can cause issues after all - that's why they were disabled in the first place), but that setting is also in System Preferences->Appearance.

Another thing you could try is removing the global preferences by pasting the following into Terminal:

rm ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist

pendragon · May 23, 2007, 03:44 PM

FWIW, Dr. Bresink had this to say (edited):

I could not reproduce this problem with any Mac OS X 10.4.9 Intel system. However, the exact results may depend on your personal language preferences and the ppi resolution of your screen.

Of course I cannot really answer questions on Apple's System Preferences application. I would assume you have a special combination of settings in your personal user defaults which cause System Preferences to behave this way. You should also verify that you are not running some software which is "patching" Mac OS X to alter its normal user interface.
--
AFAIK, I am not running any patching programs.

Maybe the solution lies with 10.4.10 or 10.5...

As always, thanks for you time and expertise; both are appreciated!

JKT · May 24, 2007, 06:22 AM

This isn't going to be fixed by Apple as this preference doesn't officially "exist" in OS X. The only way to access it is by hacking the system to activate the hidden preference (which is what TinkerTool is doing). The option to have both scroll arrows at both ends is not an active preference in a normal install for the very reason that you have discovered - it just doesn't work.

pendragon · May 24, 2007, 08:03 AM

Originally Posted by JKT

This isn't going to be fixed by Apple as this preference doesn't officially "exist" in OS X. The only way to access it is by hacking the system to activate the hidden preference (which is what TinkerTool is doing). The option to have both scroll arrows at both ends is not an active preference in a normal install for the very reason that you have discovered - it just doesn't work.

The genesis of my frustration lies with the fact that all is normal (double both works as divined) on my PPC DP 800/10.4.9, but not on my Intel iMac, and I don't understand why that should be.

Perhaps I'll move on to something easy, like brain surgery.

Still, I appreciate your time in explaining that to me, many thanks!

JKT · May 24, 2007, 08:29 AM

Double both ends won't work normally on your PPC Mac either - it might do in Sound Prefs, but for anything where the scroll bar is short and/or thin (e.g. in text input fields on many web pages) the scroller will frequently be missing.