[poynter]

OK so my mail, safari, and some other apple apps will not launch,
their icon bounces and then nothing!
I have removed preferences for safari and it did nothing.
I have removed the prefs for mail and that worked for mail.
I have used onyx, panther cache cleaner and the plist program.
Im not sure what to do next.
I use this machine every day and Im in the middle of a 60 page catalog!
If I cant fix this today it look slike I will be doing a clean install over the weekend...
When I got this machine I used FW transfer mode to import my user from my tower, now Im wandering if that may have cuased these issues.

Is there another solution before I do a clean install?

[brutal]

have you tried repairing permissions?

[poynter]

yes, with disk utility, onyx and PCC...

[Randman]

Have you done a restart? If so, create a new user and see if the problem persists. If not, it's a prefs problem.
If it does, it could be bad ram.

[poynter]

I have a user named backup that I always create on any mac.
I can login as backup and everything works perfect.

The biggest thing I dont want to lose is the last 6 months of email messages, I have a ton of customer art in my emails.

I may just create another user and go from there.

[Randman]

Hmm, you should always have a backup, even of mail. Especially if you use it in a professional setting.

Anyway, sounds like your preference files are messed up. Did you repair permissions or anything?

[poynter]

I have a backup on the tower I pulled mu user account off of.
Its just a few weeks behind.

I did repair permissions but it didnt seem to do anything.

If i create a new user account can i get my email messages and mailboxes to that account?

[Randman]

Do you have .Mac? If so, you can sync your Mail.app with .Mac. And you could also do a Backup of your mail to your iDisk or other destination, such as a DVD or external.

[poynter]

OK, I just created another user account and checked it out and everything worked fine so I logout and login under my primary account(with the problems) and now everything is back to the way it was yesterday morning!
Mail works fine, safari works fine
And now my calculator can add! (last night it wouldnt)
I have no idea what caused this but I wish I knew so I could avoid the aggrevation later on.

I have a FW drive on order for next week so Ill be doing 100% backups-woohoo!

[poynter]

Originally posted by Randman:
Do you have .Mac? If so, you can sync your Mail.app with .Mac. And you could also do a Backup of your mail to your iDisk or other destination, such as a DVD or external.

Should I just backup the folder ~username/library/mail
or is their something else I need?

[Randman]

If you do, you can use the Backup app to make a Backup (I think it compresses the files rather than a verbatim cloning). You can then choose the destination of the backed up file, iDisk, external HD, iPod, DVD, CD, etc. I backup my Safari settings and iTunes playlist to my iDisk since I have my iCal, Address Book, Safari bookmarks and mail synced (using iSync) with .Mac so I can access them from work, even if it's on a peecee.
For everything, I back up regularly using CCC to an external. I also keep some things on my iPod photo or shuffle for on-the-go usage.

It's a bit of overkill, but I'd rather be extra safe than lose something valuable, especially when it comes to work-related stuff.

[redrockdes]

I had the same experience with two different Macs in the past week, both running 10.3.8. First on my G5: no Safari, no Calculator, no Mail, no Airport connection -- just the spinning ball when I launched each of them -- and the I had to force quit each also. I thought I should repair permissions, but could not get Disk Utility to work, either.

A consultant came out to fix it and found a bad preferences file in my User account. I should have made a note of which one, but didn't -- just remembered it was an Apple file and had three initials that didn't make sense to me.

Well, yesterday on my G4 the same thing happened. I had been running an Airport connection between the G5 and G4, been struggling a bit with Mail not going through on Port 25 (this is a sporadic problem even though I use my ISP's SMTP info). Then Mail stopped entirely. I tried Safari, Calculator and Disk Utility -- nada. I decided to Repair Permissions from the Cocktail utility program, which DID work. Then I took a look at my User Preferences and tried to find one with a recent modification date, and saw "com.apple.ATS.plist."

I have no idea what it is, but after I removed it and did a restart, all my OSX applications worked again.

Does anyone know what ATS means or why this could become corrupted?

[poynter]

Thats pretty much what I did, opened preferences and sort by date and then remove everything since the problem.

com.apple.ATS.plist <--- amazing what 4k can do to a machine

good to know, this will prevent hours of downtime trying to figure out what went wrong.

Whats strange is that when this problem showed up for me I was doing the same thing I do everyday with my mac, nothing new.

[redrockdes]

I don't know if removing this .plist file will help you but it's worth a try. Good luck!

[poynter]

Found it:

http://daringfireball.net/2005/03/font_caches

appears to be ATS=Apple Type Services
Corrupt font cache!

[redrockdes]

Aha! Good sleuthing, Poynter. Thanks for the reference. Guess I'll get in the "delete font cache" mode more often.

[a holck]

I had the same thing happening when my Address book data became corrupt. Every application that integrated the data (Mail, Safari, iChat etc.) could not start up.