Having enlisted the help of the appropriate gods and spirits, my main remaining problem as I attempt to bring my MacBook Pro 17″ with Snow Leopard 10.6.2 back from the edge is with the System Preferences. It fails to show the first time I call upon it from the Apple menu (although Command-Tab shows it as an open application). I have to force quit it, then relaunch the Finder from the force quit window. Then the second time I go to the Apple menu, System Preferences opens and behaves fine.
Disk Warrior version 4.2 (reportedly optimized for Snow Leopard) reports the following:
File: “com.apple.systemuinsh.plist”
Detected that Property List data is damaged and cannot be repaired.
Unexpected character ‘ at line 1
Location: “Macintosh HD/Library/Preferences/”
My question, finally: Can I just drag a fresh System Preferences from some clean source to replace the old one? Will that fix the above problem?
Thanks.
— John Russell
Why not try deleting com.apple.systemuinsh.plist (save a copy of it somewhere just in case). System Prefs should create a new default one in its place. See if that works.