User profile for user: quark8790
quark8790 Author
User level: Level 1
14 points

Most apple apps don't work

Most of the apps that came with my Mac dont work. Mail, System Preferences, Firefox and Google Chrome all bounce for a bit in the Dock then dissapear again. System Preferences sometimes appears, but as soon as I click on something it dissapears again. Sometimes is appears twice in the Dock.


Any help would be appreciated.


P.S. my mac is an old DET model, and i got in by cheating. (apple-s on startup, mount -uw /, rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone, shutdown -h now.)

Could that have much to do with it?


P.P.S This is a multi-account system and none of these problems are experiences in other accounts made the same way. there are 2 admins and the account with probs are one of them.

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.3)

Posted on Apr 9, 2012 9:08 PM

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8 replies
User profile for user: MadisonP
MadisonP
User level: Level 5
4,844 points

Apr 9, 2012 9:27 PM in response to quark8790

Greetings,


Perhaps I'll geekfail here but I don't know what "DET" is (and wikipedia couldn't help me with it either).


As the issue is user specific we know its not the OS but rather something in your user account. Did something change on the computer which precipitated this issue?


Given that you restarted the setup assistant to access your account I would suggest bypassing normal user specific split / half issolation of your Library directory and try renaming your home folder which will reset the permissions on the files within (which may be the root cause of the issue): http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1428.


If the issue persists after following that article then I would SafeBoot and see if applicaitons work better there: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1455


Report back on your results.

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User profile for user: quark8790
quark8790 Author
User level: Level 1
14 points

Apr 11, 2012 5:12 PM in response to MadisonP

Cant help noticing that the tutorial in the first link page requires the root user, which can only be enabled through System Peferences, which we are trying to fix, which requires following the tutorial, which requres the root user....


See the problem?


And your first question, the only thing i can think of that has changed is that the account was made completely hidden. this was done like this:


In a account with System Preferences working, the account's UniqueID was changed to 495 (used to be 502),

in Terminal this was entered: 

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow Hide500Users -bool TRUE

and the home folder was made hidden like this:

setfile -a V /Users/AccountName


Thats about it.

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Most apple apps don't work

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