No Help in Help Viewer

Hi, dogman45.

1. re: Version 3000.5. As with jasperhound, that's interesting.

1.1. What model of Mac do you have? (FYI: you should add that to your profile via the "My Settings" link in the upper right of this page: it's good info for others to have should you submit questions on other topics).

1.2. Did your Mac ship with Tiger installed? If so, what version? Otherwise, what version of Tiger is on your install discs?

2. Did you Reset Help Viewer after reinstalling MacHelp.help? I presume the permissions on that file are correct? On my Mac:

Owner: system
Access: Read & Write

Group: admin
Access: Read & Write

Others: Read only

3 and 4. Help Viewer has always been buggy. I think that's clear from the size of my "Troubleshooting Help Viewer" FAQ. However, it has almost never given me problems, though I have found quite a few bugs as seen in my FAQ.

5. Have you checked your system for other potential problems? As a general checkup, I suggest you run the procedure outlined in my "Resolving Disk, Permission, and Cache Corruption" FAQ. Perform the steps therein in the order specified.

Good luck!

😉 Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X

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Note: The information provided in the link(s) above is freely available. However, because I own The X Lab™, a commercial Web site to which some of these links point, the Apple Discussions Terms of Use require I include the following disclosure statement with this post:

I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.

In thinking about this issue some more, I've added a new Step 2 to the "Rule out Internet-related issues" section of my FAQ that you may want to consider. Let me know if the new Step 2 in that section is applicable or resolves the issue.

Good luck!

😉 Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X

---
Note: The information provided in the link(s) above is freely available. However, because I own The X Lab™, a commercial Web site to which some of these links point, the Apple Discussions Terms of Use require I include the following disclosure statement with this post:

I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.

Hi, Dr Smoke

I've now done your Step 2 i.e. run Disk Utility from the Instal DVD to check/repair my hard disk and to verify/repair permissions followed by a medium clean of all caches with Tiger Clean Cache. Disk Utility found no errors by the way. I then reset Help Viewer - still no joy, I get the Mac Help front page but no further.

My MacHelp.help file is dated 27/8/05 and takes 160.93 MB. I don't use Safari much and certainly haven't 'enhanced' it; my main browser is Firefox.

I don't have another Tiger Mac, our old iMac runs 10.3.9. so can't pull a file there (I guess?). Pacifist 1.6.3 appears to open .pkg files OK on my Intel iMac. Are you suggesting it would be unwise to try to use it to move files?

Maybe I could do a full instal from the DVDs onto my Firewire drive? That would give me 10.4.5 and I could make sure that Help Viewer runs Mac Help OK under it.

As for an Archive & Instal on the main drive, that would just get me back to 10.4.4 under which Help Viewer worked. That operation would of course remove the 'benefits' of 10.4.5 - an upgrade that Apple encouraged us to make.

Perhaps I should just wait for 10.4.6? And hope that Apple reads this thread.

Hi, jasperhound.

1. You wrote:

" Pacifist 1.6.3 appears to open .pkg files OK on my Intel iMac. Are you suggesting it would be unwise to try to use it to move files?"

OK, it appears to work under Rosetta: I did not want to presume that. That's good news. You could then try that.

2. You wrote:

"My MacHelp.help file is dated 27/8/05 and takes 160.93 MB."

OK. I can't say whether that is correct or not as I can't compare it with another Intel-based Mac. Based on the size, it would be fair to assume you have not removed any language localizations using third-party tools like Monolingual.

You might want to compare this to what Pacifist reports for the file on your install disc.

3. You wrote:

"Maybe I could do a full instal from the DVDs onto my Firewire drive? That would give me 10.4.5 and I could make sure that Help Viewer runs Mac Help OK under it."

You could certainly try that as well.

4. You wrote:

"As for an Archive & Instal on the main drive, that would just get me back to 10.4.4 under which Help Viewer worked. That operation would of course remove the 'benefits' of 10.4.5 - an upgrade that Apple encouraged us to make."

Well, if you follow the full Archive & Install procedure, you'd still have 10.4.5 at the end. See my "General advice on performing an Archive and Install" FAQ.

5. re: 10.4.6. I'm not sure this is a bug in the code itself in your case. I've been following this issue for a long time and I'd say my FAQ has resolved the problem for the vast majority. The code has been a bit buggy over time, requiring some users to occasionally need to reset Help Viewer. Some third-party Internet plug-ins have caused problems. Some third-party Help files have caused problems. My FAQ addresses a littany of issues. 😉

A corrupted MacHelp.help file could have been installed at the factory. Some issue with your computer may have caused it to become corrupted. Some third-party app or utility you have installed may be interfering with proper operation of Help Viewer. In some cases, such as your post here and dogman45's, it has been very hard to pin down. WIthout direct access to your Mac, we need to plug away using the trial-and-error method.

Good luck!

😉 Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X

---
Note: The information provided in the link(s) above is freely available. However, because I own The X Lab™, a commercial Web site to which some of these links point, the Apple Discussions Terms of Use require I include the following disclosure statement with this post:

I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.

dogman45 wrote:

" Once I loaded these updates help stopped working"

OK, what updates were these?

Good luck!

😉 Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X

The cache to which you are referring identified is just one part of the Reset Help Viewer instructions in my FAQ. The correct name for the cache is in the FAQ. That's nothing new and something you would have tried before if you followed my FAQ as you indicated you had.

It's unforuntate you did not take notes when performed the long reinstall experiment. It may have been helpful to know specifically what "the last three updates..." were.

Good luck!

😉 Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X

Just to say that upgrading to 10.4.6 has brought Mac Help? back. Thanks to all who offered advice, I was vainly battling an OS buglet, gone for the moment.