[Reggie Fowler]

What is the best program for locating and deleting corrupt preferences?

[ntsc]

the Finder will do this for you, look in your home folder and there should a folder in there called Library, in that there should be another folder called Preferences. Open this and you can see all of the preferences for your user account applications. to find a particular application preferences look for the file called "com.companyname.productname.plist" where companyname is the name of the copmany which produced your softare like apple and the product is the name of the software eg "com.apple.Safari.plist"

have fun

[Mithras]

Also, if a program crashes several times in a row under Tiger, the system will offer to rename the old preferences file to see if that fixes the problem.

[Macola]

If you suspect a problem, you can run plutil in the Terminal. Or, if you prefer, look for Preferential Treatment on Versiontracker. Does the same thing, but with a nice GUI.

[Mithras]

Originally Posted by Macola

If you suspect a problem, you can run plutil in the Terminal.

Oh, good point. Here's a little command to get a list of preferences with problems:
cd ~/Library/Preferences
plutil -- *.plist | grep -v ': OK' | pbcopy

Then open TextEdit and hit command-V to paste the results into a window.

[Kenstee]

Here's Preferential Treatment: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/22790