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FileVault and Launch Services

I seem to have a conflict between FileVault and Launch Services. Whenever I assign a custom URL handler or file extension, the settings are forgotten on a reboot.

Can someone please verify if this happens with their set up too? It's exceptionally annoying for me, even though I don't reboot that often.

To duplicate:
1) Create a new account
2) Log in to the new account.
3) Enable FileVault
4) Modify Launch Services settings. I usually start Firefox and set it as the default browser when prompted. Changing assignments for file extensions (using Finder or RCDefaultApp) will also exhibit the same issue.
5) Reboot (don't just log out) and, if necessary, log into the new account.
6) Check Launch Services settings again. In my case, I start Firefox again. It will prompt to be set as the default browser again, indicating that the previous settings were not retained.

Some cases, it seems the settings seem to be retained over one reboot, but will be lost the next. Settings will be preserved when only logging in and out without a reboot.

The problems go away when I disable FileVault. I've checked ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.LaunchServices.plist and it's fine across reboots. It seems that LaunchServices itself isn't reading the file when its in FileVault.

This a a clean installation of Leopard, not an upgrade of any sort.

Thanks in advance.

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.5)

Posted on Nov 12, 2007 8:39 PM

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Posted on Nov 19, 2007 6:35 AM

Yes I see it too. In my case it seems com.apple.LaunchServices.plist is resetting with every boot. I typically change various video types from quicktime to vlc among other things. I'm plaaning on seeing if I can work around this with a login script.
In addition to this behavior I cannot get launch services to truly respect file extensions. My primary example: I have digital comics. These are typically zipped or rared sets of jpegs, using zip/rar purely for packaging purposes not compression. The extensions are then standardly set to cbz or cbr (comic book zip/rar). If I assign these to the comic reader, it works until reboot, but .zip and. rar extensions are also mapped to the reader. The opposite problem occurs if I set the zip/rar to something , The plist file does not record the extensions at all in in some cases, going strictly by the type of file, which actually are not different. This was no problem in 10.4.
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FileVault and Launch Services

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