Quick Look functionality gone

check to see if all quicklook plugins are in place. look in /system/library/quicklook. what exactly do you have in there? I've seen a few posts when people were missing some plugins after doing a full TM restore.

Aerospeed wrote:
Hmm. I have 11 plugins, all of them ".qlgenerator".
Audio, Clippings, EPS, iChat, MeshKit, Office, Package, PDF, StandardBundles, Text, Web.

those are correct.

I checked on another laptop running 10.6 and the only plugins in the folder were iChat and Office,

you are looking in the wrong folder. those plugins are in /Library/quicklook not /system/library/quicklook.

yet it is able to display Quick Look windows just fine.

I should also mention that videos do not play in the Quick Look window, but their audio does.

create a new user account and log into it. does quicklook work there?

Aerospeed wrote:

V.K. wrote:
create a new user account and log into it. does quicklook work there?

Tried that; same problem. :/

Is there potentially a way to reinstall Quick Look? I have to say, it's one of the Finder's most useful features for me.

that's the problem. there is nothing to reinstall as you seem to have all the components of quicklook in place. you can try reinstalling the contents of /System/library/quicklook from the SL install DVD using Pacifist http://www.charlessoft.com/ . Then reinstall 10.6.2 combo update. see if that helps. if not I would suggest reinstalling Snow leopard on top of your current system.

i'm trying re-installing mac os 10.6.2 combo (462 mb...), some one told me that this solve the problem, i think that it's a bug of the restoring system by a time machine back up...

Sorry for my bad english...
Daniele

I am having the same issue after a Time Machine restore. Did reinstalling the 10.6.2 combo fix it?

I had the same problem as many are reporting above, but reinstalling 10.6.2 (twice) did not solve it.

There's a command line utility called qlmanage that allows you to test quicklook on specific files. From this I found that the thumbnails and previews were in fact available; but oddly, running +qlmanage -m+ did not return the statistical information expected, but instead an error message "[QL] Can't get server port for <QLServer com.apple.quicklook>: Unknown service name". So apparently the quicklookd server was not running.

After a bit of digging, I found that the plist file /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.quicklook.plist was missing from my system. Hello, Time Machine: I restored the plist file from an earlier backup, ran +sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.quicklook.plist+, logged out, logged back in, and voilà, quicklook now worked.