System Preferences Screen Saver Bug

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System Preferences Screen Saver Bug

I recently purchased a new iMac running Mountain Lion (previous computer was first gen intel Macbook Pro running Lion) and have noticed that a bug that persisted on my previous computer now exists on my new one!

Essentially, when I browse to the Screen Saver Tab in System Preferences, it says "There was a problem connecting to the server X" which was an old networked computer (which has never been mapped ever to my new iMac) and the prompt refuses to go away until I close system preferences.

I have restored my Pictures, Movies, Music using my previous time machine backup (no migration assistant used) and selecting the previous volume... but I don't know how that would cause the following? (See image):

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

iMac, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3)

Posted on Apr 15, 2013 8:42 PM

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Answer 1

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Scotch_Brawth

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825 points

Apr 16, 2013 9:16 AM in response to _RC4_

I had a similar problem because of an old NFS mount. I don't know how these are set up in Mountain Lion, but I used to do it in Disk Utility.

That's not much to go on, I know, but it was a while ago.

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Answer 2

_RC4_ Author

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Aug 6, 2013 6:58 PM in response to Scotch_Brawth

The thing is I've never mounted it on this computer so I don't know what it's referencing... I did a Time Machine restore of Documents, Photos, Music and Videos (not whole machine, just selected bits) so I thought it might be something to do with that?

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Answer 3

_RC4_ Author

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Oct 14, 2013 10:40 PM in response to _RC4_

FIXED IT!!! 😀

Ok - so in case anybody else suffers this problem it turned out the iPhoto Library was referencing a folder of files on a (non existant) other computer. This explains why:

1. It always happened when I went into Wallpaper prefs (was looking for these non existent photos)

2. It didn't appear in Disk Utility (because it was within the iPhoto Library package itself (i.e. the database)

3. It happened on a new computer as the iPhoto library was restored from a previous computer.

In order to find this, I troubleshooted by moving the iPhoto Library to desktop (without opening it) and wall/screensaver prefs worked fine. Then, I used terminal and the grep command (screenshot attached) to find where it was referencing "kitch_n_stage" (I.e. the windows share). Then I moved those files to the trash, but the iPhoto library back and opened iPhoto. It had to rebuild the database as I removed the photos folder and the library.adpb file.

The command was grep -lr "name of shared computer" *

(Would suggest backing up your iphoto library before doing this)

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