Need to reset/reinstall address book

Hello and welcome to the Discussions.

Let's do a test of the AB application by creating a New User Account on your Mac, and as that New User attempt to launch the Address Book application. This will tell us if there is a problem with the application. See:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.4/en/mh168.html

If it works as that New User, then we can purge some preference files without doing anything to the application.

Also, use Disk Utility from the Applications/Utilities to Verify the hard drive -- this is different from Verify or Repair Permissions.

Ernie

I don't know which plist in the Preferences folder would have been altered by AddressX. Perhaps an examination of dates last modified or a comparison with those in the other User Account might help. The candidates, found at Home/Library/Preferences, in likely order of importance to this problem are: com.apple.AddressBook.plist, com.apple.AddressBook.abd.plist and AddressBookMe.plist. I would start by dragging the first one to the Desktop, and trying again to launch Address Book in your original user folder.

Ernie

The data files for the Address Book are found at Home/Library/Application Support/AddressBook. In that folder there are older versions of the AB data -- you might check to see if AddressX altered all of them, or not. For example you could delete AddressBook.data, rename AddressBook.data.previous to be merely AddressBook.data and try launching the application.

I would make a copy of the AddressBook folder before beginning this experimentation, however.

If you did want to import (which can be done) what would be your source? As you can see above, you could begin anew by deleting files in the data folder.

Ernie

Not sure how it happened but I opened Powerbook today and Address Book icon had a ? across it ..... horrors .... the application had disappeared and nothing in the Trash??? The data files are intact as I can see them using Address Book widget and all synchronised through .Mac
I did a Combo Update of 10.4.10 and Address Book "appears" to be loaded but only comes up with a generic app iconand doesn't load when clicked.
Any ideas welcome???

Hello,

See about Custom Installation from the install disk:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301229

Then run the Combo Update again, to bring the AB app up to snuff!

Ernie