For some reason the Language and Text and Keyboard System Preferences reset every once in a while. It isn't very frequent, just slightly unnerving. What could cause this? There have been no system updates apart from a Adobe Reader update yesterday and nothing else has changed. They just reset to defaults during my latest restart.
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
What do they reset to? Preferences don't "reset"; they get corrupted and therefore their settings get ignored or set as something they shouldn't be. Did you try booting from your Snow Leopard DVD and running Repair Permissions, and then Repair disk to see if any problems were found and corrected?
That would be the first thing I'd do.
I doubt this is a Permissions issue -- running Permissions repair is harmless, but probably not needed -- but do not run Repair Permissions booted from the Snow DVD. This will almost inevitably introduce Permissions errors where there were none. You should repair Permissions booted normally. This is what Apple recommends. For a full explanation, see my post here
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3124635?start=0&tstart=0
Sometimes, preference settings may come unglued due to low free drive space. Select the HD icon and do a GetInfo.
If this continues, you could try moving this file found in your user Library/Preferences to the Trash (don't empty yet.) Re-open Sys Prefs; a new preference file will be created automatically.
/Users/yourusername/Library/Preferences/com.apple.systempreferences.plist
Thanks for the replies. I don't think this is a permissions issue either, not that many things actually are. But it's not a disk space issue either. I have over 20 GB free on my 300 GB SSD, that should be plenty.
The preferences reset to their default US values. What makes this odd is that it's just "Language and Text" and "Keyboard". I probably have some prefpanes that I have never changed from their default values, so I can't really be sure what has reset and what has not but it's definitely not all.
I'll keep your suggestion in mind, WZZZ and I'll do that if it happens again. Probably renaming the original file will work too.
System preferences reset on their own
