[sweetmelinda]

All of a sudden my safari opens then closes immediately. I found the crash report and it says that it is version 4.1.3. and my OS version is 10.4.11.
it says that exception: EXC_Bad_Access
Codes: Kern_invalid_addrss
any help would be appreciated. thanks

[P]

Hello and welcome to our forums. I have moved your question to the Applications forum, as it isn't really a hardware-related question.

Most likely your copy of Safari has been damaged. First thing to try is to reinstall the latest Safari update, which you can find here, and see if that helps.

[kittonian]

Yup, reinstalling the latest update is always the best first step, but beyond that reboot and without any applications open, open Disk Utility and repair permissions. You may find that there are a lot of files that need to be corrected and then everything will work properly once again.
Good luck!

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally Posted by kittonian 

Yup, reinstalling the latest update is always the best first step, but beyond that reboot and without any applications open, open Disk Utility and repair permissions. You may find that there are a lot of files that need to be corrected and then everything will work properly once again.
Good luck!

There is almost 0% chance that this will do any good whatsever in this particular situation, and a fairly close to 0% that it would in most others.

Those files that "need to be corrected" usually don't, and will show up every time.

[kittonian]

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot 

There is almost 0% chance that this will do any good whatsever in this particular situation, and a fairly close to 0% that it would in most others.

Those files that "need to be corrected" usually don't, and will show up every time.

As a former Apple employee on their technical team, I can tell you that statement is absolutely false. There have been countless instances over the years where the procedure I described solved all the issues. I'm not saying it will work every time, but there's no reason not to give it a shot.

[Waragainstsleep]

I've seen it work more than once too.

That said, if it doesn't, we would probably be able to help narrow it down from the crash logs available from the Console app.

[P]

Running permissions repair rarely hurts anything, so why not, go ahead. It's the obsessives that keep running that repair as some sort of preventative cleaning that we usually make fun of. It's the Mac OS X version of rebuilding the desktop, except much more transparent and for that reason more obviously funny to joke about.

One thing that strikes me, however: There is a limited set of files that it hurts to change the permissions of. If this TRULY is a problem now, today, with 10.6 and 10.7 (as opposed to inept installers in 10.1 and thereabouts), why doesn't Apple just make a little daemon that logs when the permissions are changed on one of those files? It could be installed on dev betas or internal Apple machines for a while, reporting back every now and then (after asking, obviously) about which processes tried to change the permissions. Apple could then make a top ten list and tell the developers of those apps to fix their bugs. The problem would be fixed, or at least severely reduced, in a few months time.