[sknapp351]

I was trying to describe to a friend where to find preference folders and was walking through it on my machine, when I saw this:




What would cause this? I don't think I have ever noticed it before, and assume it is not normal. There are 548 items in HD/users/username/library/preferences. About half seemed to be named properly. I am on a MBP 2.0 2GB ram running 10.4.10. I haven't noticed any performance issues, but just wanted to know what this might be from.
Thanks,
SAm

[rehoot]

I'm assuming that when you installed OS X that you did not select a language like Tibetan or Urdu and that you did not install dozens of programs that use non-Latin-based languages. I would run Disk Utility to check the disk volume. If you reboot and still see that junk, you might want to archive those folders to an external backup, then delete them all. You can generally delete Preferences without harm because the programs will just restore them to default settings. Assuming your language setting is English or some other Latin-based language, your programs won't find those preferences any way. There are other possible causes for this, but my first guess was that there was some type of write error that wacked the files.