OSX Mavericks System Preference Pane Not Working

Speaking of default systems in OS ... and this is for another thread I guess, I don't want to hijack this one ... but this fix for System Prefs: Network: Advanced, also fixed my Gatekeeper default. It would not allow me to select Anywhere for apps downloaded despite the fact that it was from Scottrade's Streaming Quotes .. a site I was able to access for years prior to the Mavericks upgrade. Now I can ... and, yes, I know ... to be VERY careful with that selected.

I had already tried just about everything suggested in various posts except taking a look at my guest account or creating a new Admin account to see if the 'button' problem existed there.

I ran the three terminal commands suggested by you;

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSUseLeopardWindowValues YES

defaults write com.apple.Safari NSUseLeopardWindowValues NO

killall SystemUIServer

And as you stated..."Now its all working again."

I'm not completely positive this was the fix for me as I had also concurently performed a few other things but I do strongly suspect this may have been what worked for me. Sorry I can't be more certain about this, I know better than to get impatient and try more than one fix at a time...I think I just got lucky this time!

Thanks to all for sharing and best wishes for finding your 'fix'.

ST

If your Safari windows look different and you'd prefer, run:

defaults write com.apple.Safari NSUseLeopardWindowValues YES

I have the problem with my Mail window showing grey boxes supered over main title bar and icons/buttons. The following command appears to have solved this in Safari:

defaults write com.apple.Safari NSUseLeopardWindowValues YES

Would I be safe to presume that the following command would fix that problem in Mail?

defaults write com.apple.Mail NSUseLeopardWindowValues YES

Ed

Mavericks 10.9.1 Mac Pro 3,1 Early 2008

That depends on if Mail has that key & it causes the same behaviour.

Anything you can write is possible to read first…

defaults read com.apple.Mail NSUseLeopardWindowValues

or read everything in Mail's key value settings

defaults read com.apple.Mail

I'd also suggest the manual…

man defaults

will show …https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/ man1/defaults.1.html

Bear in mind the 'global domain' alters settings for ALL users, so it's one way to decern if a change is just inside a user account or not (login as a new user to see if that has the same issue).

Are you saying that "defaults read...etc" will preview the command without executing it?

Ed

No, I'm saying 'defaults read' will read the current setting.

If you RTM it may become a little clearer…

read Prints all of the user's defaults, for every domain, to standard output.

The defaults DB is a (somewhat complex) list of settings that apply to Application, user and system 'domains'.

You can go ahead & use the defaults write command if you really want, but settings keys & forgetting about them usually creates these issues years later, hence my suggestion to 'read before you write'.

I'd also consider 'deleting' values instead of setting to 'NO' or 'false' etc, so that the system can simply use it's own default value (as mentioned earlier - https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5484035?answerId=23760753022#23760753022).

Try this, it solved me

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5608188?answerId=23939515022#23939515022

Dear fellows in misery,

same location (GUI), but still slightly different phenomenon, not sure yet, if same issue:

1) since 10.9.1 i guess it's not possible to configure "System Preferences > Internet Accounts" any longer since then i face a rendering issue which simply hides the entries of present accounts.

Same issue for all other local accounts and also new ones.

Attempt to add new accounts by "+" dies in silence.

Looks:

2) Having put all my hopes into OS-X 10.9.2, this vanished today (post upgrade state).

3) Efforts such as the following didn't do the trick either:

==============================================

sudo defaults write com.apple.Safari NSUseLeopardWindowValues NO

killall SystemUIServer

sudo defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSUseLeopardWindowValues YES

sudo defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSUseLeopardWindowValues YES

sudo defaults write com.apple.Safari NSUseLeopardWindowValues YES

sudo defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool false

killall SystemUIServer

defaults read -g AppleUseCoreUI

2014-02-28 17:12:53.349 defaults[4765:507]

The domain/default pair of (kCFPreferencesAnyApplication, AppleUseCoreUI) does not exist

defaults read com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow

2014-02-28 17:13:16.241 defaults[4786:507]

The domain/default pair of (com.apple.screencapture, disable-shadow) does not exist

defaults read NSGlobalDomain NSUseLeopardWindowValues

2014-02-28 17:13:30.955 defaults[4794:507]

The domain/default pair of (kCFPreferencesAnyApplication, NSUseLeopardWindowValues) does not exist

sudo defaults read NSGlobalDomain NSUseLeopardWindowValues

YES

sudo defaults read NSGlobalDomain NSUseLeopardWindowValues

YES

sudo defaults read com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow

0

==============================================

4) Equipment:

Hardware:

MacBook Pro

13-inch, Mid 2009

Processor 2,26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

Graphics NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 256 MB

Software: OS X 10.9.2 (13C64)

5) Any ideas?

All the typical rendering issues others report and do pretty similar do not apply for me.

All other preference-panel items also work just fine.

Reinstalling is not an option here, since heavily under schedule pressure.

Best regards

All my smart folders disappeared today, and I couldn't open the preference pane.

I was able to (accidentally) get the preferences pane to work again by:

- logging out of Finder

- logging in as a new user

- mail opened as if it was brand new, and asked me to enter my icloud address & password

- I opened the preference pane in mail, which worked fine

- logged out of that account

- logged back into my real user account

- and I was suddenly able to open the preference pane with in mail

My smart folders which had disappeared still did not reappear, however.