OSX Mavericks System Preference Pane Not Working

Thanks macmark2,

This fixes my issue too : https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5544980

We live in hope. Process went well in terminal but I remain unsolved. Thanks so much for the help.

YES YES YES YES YES!!! I did a reinstall of Mavericks which made no difference and then I applied this fix and it just worked. I had applied it before the re-install but it didn't work then. So for those who have an initial fail, perhaps an "install on top" and then run them in terminal is the final solution? Thank you so so much. I now have a very fast system (thanks etrecheck) and a perfectly working system preferences app. Only 17 hours in total but worth every second. Thank you Luke and Macmark2 - champions both.

Thinking beyond the square, I wonder if switching to grayscale would make the fault go away? Having spent 24 hours relaxing after the big fix, I just wondered if it did bring the tabs back to life if that would be an indicator? If it did work would then switching back to colour cure the problem without doing the terminal fix. I might be talking kaka but at least I'm using a lttle brain power.

Hi, great fix and definetely investigated in the right direction. Working with the impacted system I found many other graphical oddities in other applications some of them impacting the usablity of the applcation, e.g. Xmind.

Safari has no shadow and a strange background behind the title text of the window.

After I upgraded to 10.9 the shadow of the Safari window was gone.

Logging in on the same system with the "2nd admin account" or the guest account Safari does have a shadow and the preference pane sub-windows also work fine.

I will put the fix to work now.

Thx a lot

Cheers

Jo

Can you try:

defaults write -g AppleUseCoreUI -bool NO

I think that did it for me.

Just the commands alone above were not sufficient.

Not sure if this comman or a reboot did it.

Jo

Hey all,

It's occured to me maybe it would be safer to delete the defaults values instead of setting them to NO or false. That way it can't crop up in a few years when something else weird changes in the OS.

e.g. for Jokern's last post…

defaults delete -g AppleUseCoreUI

and in luke_aus's fix, the line that disables the shadow

defaults delete com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow

You can read the values back to see if they are really gone…

defaults read -g AppleUseCoreUI

defaults read com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow

YES!! Thank you!! Awesome!

Sorted! Thanks, I had issues with System Prefs, and also was unable to export anything from Aperture (export dialogue would not appear)

Yes - thank you so much. This has been causing me a problem since upgrading to Mavericks! Did a reinstall of of Mavericks which didn't change anything. I was thinking about ditching my time capsule but then got to this great solution. Strange that I could access the time capsule data via the finder but Time Machine just wouldn't function.

Thanks again.

It worked for me as well. Thanks!!

Thanks.

This fixed this problem for me (and other problems I was having in some apps since upgading to Mavericks. I just thought they were buggy.). Didn't even know I had the problem until yesterday when I tried to change my wifi settings for the first time since upgrading to Mavericks.

FWIW, I had the same problem--couldn't unlock the lock. I'm the admin and only user on a new MBP with Mavericks installed.

I tried resetting permissions. (hold down ctrl+option+P+R while booting up.) IT WORKED. I can now open the lock and change all settings. PROBLEM SOLVED.

Definitely the first thing to try, before going for the elaborate fixes.

Steve

Drew-

Luke's fix worked for me, too, but I'll keep your update handy in case it happens again.

I love the Apple Discussions site. For years, it's always been the most useful discussion forum I've ever used. Thanks to everyone for hanging in until the fix was found. These posts are like gifts that keep on giving. :-)

Dedo wrote:

Drew-

Luke's fix worked for me, too, but I'll keep your update handy in case it happens again.

I love the Apple Discussions site. For years, it's always been the most useful discussion forum I've ever used. Thanks to everyone for hanging in until the fix was found. These posts are like gifts that keep on giving. :-)

It's like 12 days of gifts but with stuff that is actually useful 🙂

The defaults system is a DB of keys & values, so I figure deleting the keys should be safer than setting the values to 'no'. The defaults system should simply read it's own 'default value' if the key doesn't exist in any of the altered DB's (the system has the usual system wide DB & user level DB's).

It's clear that having them set to values Apple didn't test can cause weird issues on new OS's, I expect it'll be a few more OS versions before it comes back around to bite people in other bizarre ways 😠

It's a shame this happens, the defaults system makes the OS much nicer.