[Ernst Jan]

My original user account on this MacBook (V5.1) has become unusable as this "connection failed" message keeps popping up. It tells me it is trying to connect to a 'server' with a name that resembles my other (old) MacBook. And it shows the light blue disk icon with the puppets on it (the 'share' icon). I cannot for the life of me think of a reason why. It keeps doing this, after a clean restart, no apps open.. obviously it wants to connect real, real bad.

Logfiles show nothing at all. I have checked every single entry. I have "grep"ped through most of my harddrive.. and nothing pops up.

I've looked everywhere on the net, find lots of people with the same problem, but no solution.

A couple of questions that boggle me, and I hope someone is able to answer:

- How does one figure out what application (or part of the OS) is generating this error.

- Where does OS X store tables of server names it has previously connected to? It will have to resolve these names to ip-addresses somewhere..

- Can it be stopped? And how.

I think this is a really serious flaw. No matter what anyone does to make this error happen, the OS should at least tell you what's going on, and have ways of stopping this error from recurring ad infinitum.

[Ernst Jan]

No-one here who has some in-depth knowledge of AFP.. the way connections are invoked, how logging can be enabled? I've found numerous Mac users on the web that have the exact same troubles.. wouldn't it be nice if we could fix this?

[Big Mac]

This is the first time I've heard of this "very common" problem. Have you looked in your Login Items pane to see if there's a share alias in the list? Have you tried doing an Archive and Install of the OS?

[P]

It's the holidays and traffic is low. A few days without an answer is no cause for concern this time of year.

Have you tried making a new user account and seeing if it happens there?

You can see all open files using the command lsof on the terminal - it will list the open files to the right and the app using it on the left, which a bunch of info in between. If you let the connection open (if that's possible), you should see which process is doing it. I'm not sure if you can see it while the connection is opening. Alternatively, you can see if you can figure something out using lsof -i (which shows network connections), but I doubt that you'll see anything interesting there.

Finally: what version of the OS do you have?

[Ernst Jan]

I've switched to another user account, and it doesn't occur there. But it's a hassle getting everything back in place..

My OS is 10.6.2 .. I keep it up to date.

UPDATE: I've fired up my old account.. with my old Laptop powered up. That's where it was trying to connect to. Lsof gave me a clue.. apparently Stuffit Expander's "Magic Menu" was referencing a file on my old computer.

Too bad the "connection failed" popup doesn't have an option of showing just a little bit more info. Would have saved me a lot of time and trouble.

I hope it's fixed now. I'll keep you guys posted.