How to reinstall Address Book in Lion?

Try running a Repair Permissions routine on your boot volume from Disk Utility. You'll find Disk Utility inside /Applications/Utilities.

polishedstaple wrote:

Then I went into the Application Support / Address Book folder and removed the two files in there, but that didn't work even though the Address Book recreated them.

Try deleting the files/folders:

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.AddressBook.plist

Is the next step to reinstall? If so, how do I do that considering that Lion did not come on a DVD?

Boot into recovery (Hold ⌘R on boot)

Select Reinstall OS X Lion

An app not opening a file or itself is rarely a problem with the app itself. It's a problem with the support or data files.

First, try deleting the com.apple.addressbook.plist from your user/Library/Preferences folder.

If that doesn't work, try opening it in another user account.

Do you have any Address Book plugins? If so, move those out of the plug-ins folder (user/Library/Address Book Plug-ins/). If it works, then add them back, one-by-one until you find the offender.

Thank you John, finaly I fixed my problem. 🙂

Thanks Tony T1,

In the past five years or so I haven't encountered any crash, but today I suddenly wasn't able to open Contacts in OS 10.8.1 without crashing and slurping up over 6GB ⚠ of memory, effectively taking my entire Mac hostage.
(As seen in Activity Monitor.)

Running Repair Permissions and numerous reboots didn't do anything, but throwing everyting named 'Address Book' out of the ~/Library/Preferences
and
~/Library/Caches solved my problem instantly.

So, thanks Tony.
S.

I'm struggling to find the plist files - they don't seem to be where you indicated they would be.

My Address Book crashed this morning and now the search function within the application is not working. Nor can I edit within the main window. I can open contacts in standalone windows and can edit, but not in the normal manner.