Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Second Edition

Minor Eccentric Behavior

Mac OS X itself is generally about as unstable as Mount Everest. It’s the programs that most often cause you grief.

All kinds of glitches may befall you. Maybe Mail has sprouted new mailboxes, or your Freehand palettes won’t stay put, or the Dock leaves remnants of its “puff of smoke” animation on the screen.

When a single program is acting up like this, try the following steps, in the following sequence.

First Resort: Look for an Update

If a program starts acting up immediately after you’ve installed or upgraded to Mac OS X 10.2, chances are good that it has some minor incompatibility. Chances are also good that you’ll find an updated version on the company’s Web site.

Second Resort: Restart the Program

If a program starts acting up, the first and easiest step to take is simply to quit the program and start it up again.

Remember that in Mac OS X, every program lives and dies in solitude, in its own stainless-steel memory bubble. Jettisoning a confused program doesn’t affect other running programs in the least. Restarting the flaky program lets it load from scratch, having forgotten all about its previous problems.

Third Resort: Toss the Prefs File

Here we are in the age of Mac OS X, and we’re still throwing away preference files?

Absolutely. A corrupted preference file can bewilder the program that depends on it just as badly as it did in Mac OS 9.

Before you go on a dumpfest, however, take this simple test. Log in using a different account (perhaps a dummy account ...