QuickTime Player quits when opening a file

Extended version of AHT reports. "No troubles found".

I have actually been using an 3TB external hard drive as my startup drive for some time now. My internal 640GB hard drive, which was running out of space, has been idle. The internal drive has OS X 10.8.2 on it.

As a test, I started up from the internal drive and was able to run both QuickTime Player and DVD Player without any issue. What I am thinking of doing at this point is update the sytem and application software on the internal drive and use that as my startup drive.

If there are any applications on the external drive that are not on the internal drive, I would, cautiously, move those I actually use to the internal drive. Then I could erase my external drive and use it only for user files, which I would restore from backup.

This morning, I changed my startup drive to the internal drive, which was running OS X 10.8.2. I tested both QuickTime Player and DVD Player, which worked without any problem.

Next, I ran Software Update and updated the following:

HP Software Update 2.14;

Java for OS X 2013-004 1.0;

OS X Update Combined 10.8.4; and

iTunes 11.0.4

After the restart, I again tested QuickTime Player and DVD Player, which worked without any problem.

Next, I changed my Home directory to the external drive, which I had previously been my startup drive and which held all my user files.

After a restart, I again tested QuickTime Player and DVD Player, which again worked without any problem.

I also ran iTunes, iCal, iPhoto, and Mail to confirm that those applications were using the Home folder on the external drive. I also navigated to the user folder on the external drive to confirm that it showed the Home folder icon.

By Control-clciking on the icons in the Dock, and choosing "Show in Finder" I can see the icons for Apple applications refer to applications on the internal drive, while the icons for third party applications refer to applications on the external drive. This is something that I will fix later after I am sure that the QuickTime Player and DVD Player crashes do not recur after a few days as they did before.

Just before my last post, t1042 said that he did that, but that after tree days, the error returned.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, as they say. In the interest of perhaps helping someone else, I did reinstall Security Update 2013-003 and it has , at least temporarily, fixed the problem.

I need to point out though, that I had previously installed this update on July 22, after reinstalling OS X 10.8.4. That also fixed the problem, but only until July 27. Then the problem resurfaced.

I will see if the fix lasts longer this time.

By the way, my other solution, changing the startup drive to my internal drive, has the potential of freeing about 38GB of space on my external disk.

That did not take long. QuickTime Player has crashed. I was using the external drive as startup. That is the startup drive where this problem originally occured, and on which the problem was very temporarily solved by reinstalling Security Update 2013-003.

Using my internal drive as startup, the crashes have not occured. I just hope that this holds up. If it does, I will erase the external drive, reinstall OS X 10.8.4, so I can use it as an emergency boot disk, and otherwse use it only for my Home folder.

Were you also experiencing DVD Player crashes?

I just ran Software Update, which showed that I do not have Security Update 2013-003 installed on this drive. Perhaps you are right about that being the source of the problem. Strange.