System Preferences Lost upon Restart / Reboot

HI,

Is this mouse a USB connection? If so, try resetting the SMC: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1543

Permissions issues. Launch Disk Utility. (Applications/Utilities) Select MacintoshHD in the panel on the left, select FirstAid, then click: Repair Disk Permissions. Quit DU when it's finished and reboot.

If nothing above helps, back up your files and do an Archive and Install.



Carolyn 🙂

I'm having the same problem. Sometimes after a system startup I notice that some of my preferences are lost and things revert back to their default values. This can affect the Dock, Finder, iTunes, Screen Saver hot corners, etc. Each time the problem occurs it seems to be a different set of preferences lost and it doesn't happen all the time. For instance, the dock might move from my preferred location at the left side of the screen to the default location at the bottom of the screen. And sometimes all the icons that I normally have in my dock disappear and the default list is shown instead.

I have this problem on a Mac Pro running 10.5.6 but it has been occurring ever since I upgraded to Leopard. However, this problem does not happen on any of the other Macs that I own.

If you go to Users/yourusername/Library/Preferences and move the com.apple.systempreferences.plist to the desktop, it should reset all your System Preferences to the default after a restart. You’ll need to reset your System Preferences again, but you’ll be starting with a fresh preference file.

You should also remove that same named file, but with a randomly generated Hex code number before the .plist, from the ByHost folder, also located in that Preferences folder.

Try moving the files I mentioned above. It can’t hurt, other than needing to reset all your preferences as the system will generate new .plist files. If you move the files to the Desktop and restart, and it doesn’t help, you can move those files from the Desktop back to the original Preferences folder and it will replace the newly created settings.

This happened to me last night as well . . . I winder if Safari beta has anything to do with it?

Was this helpful? I am having the same problems. Just started over the past week. Any changes I make to my preferences get reset when I log out.

I gave it a go, but it didn't work. Preferences reverted at restart.