[lookmark]

Since I don't use Help Viewer very often, I'm not sure when this problem began. But I've noticed that I now cannot get Help from any application.

The Help Viewer icon appears in the Dock, but doesn't finish loading, just bounces forever. Eventually I have to force-quit.

Any suggestions? Deleting the com.apple.help.plist preferences file in ~/Library/Preferences hasn't worked. I've logged in and out, but haven't rebooted in quite a while.

p.s. By the way, has Help Viewer always been only in System/Core Services? That's the only place it's located on my machine.

[philzilla]

how long have you left it to get on with things? mine takes FOREVER to get going, but it does eventually get there. i'm talking at least five minutes, which is just completely unacceptable. so, crank it up, go and have a bite to eat, come back and report your findings. it just might be the same sketch as mine.

does this happen for anyone else?

[gorickey]

Mine is slow as well...5 minutes slow? No. Jaguar has this down and fixed though from what I've seen.

[seb2]

you might try to delete ~/Library/Preferences/Apple Help Prefs (directory), that's where it caches stuff. the next time you launch it, it'll take a bit longer than usual (if it works, however; shouldn't matter to you) and rebuild the index.

another problem in earlier versions of os x (that seems to be fixed now) was that help viewer didn't launch if the name of your hd contained high bit ascii characters. in that case, the only choice you had was to rename your hd.