Unexpected Quitting - AppleWorks

[Stormyguy]

Hi All

I wonder if anyone could assist. I've just bought a 12" iBook for my partner's business and she is having repeated problems as follows. We'll send the machine back to the supplier if necessary but they are a ways away from us and we'd like to see if we can diagnose/solve ourselves with your help.

It's AppleWorks which is behaving bizarrely:
1. It will unexpectedly quit frequently
2. It changes the data in cells (particularly text cells - it will alter the first letter of the word in the cell and add characters etc)

She's had iPhoto quit a couple of times and iTunes once.

This machine is not connected to the internet so it's not easy for her to send the crash reports to Apple but I have been saving them as text files in case anyone needs to see them.

We have already restored the software from the Software Restore CD to no avail, so I wonder if you have suggestions for our next course of action?

My tech skills are pretty limited so thanks in advance

 

[HexMonkey]

Firstly, have you tried repairing permissions? This is in Disk Utility, select the hard disk and click the 'Repair disk permissions' button.

If that doesn't fix the problem, create a new user and see if the problem occurs there. If you can isolate the problem to one user, then it will probably be something in the user's folder which should be easy to track down (For AppleWorks, try deleting Home/Documents/AppleWorks User Data and Home/Library/Preferences/com.apple.appleworks.plist).

If none of this works and you can't narrow down the problem, you may end up having to reinstall the system.

 

[Billicus]

Before you do anything drastic, make sure you have the latest avaliable version of Appleworks, avaliable here. If that doesn't work, try making another account on the computer to see if the problem persists. If not, you may have corrupted Preference Files in your first account. You should be able to fix this by searching for and deleting all com.apple.appleworks.plist files. (Just like HexMonkey said.)

 

[Stormyguy]

hexmonkey: Thanks for the advice, have run the repair app and we'll see what happens. We'll make a new user if necessary and try that.

Billicus: I wasn't aware there was a 6.2.9 version of AppleWorks - software update hasn't picked that up on this machine (unless of course it was a v.recent update - we only plug her iBook in to the 'net when she brings it to mine where we have a DSL connection). We've been on 6.2.7 until now. Thanks for the heads-up!

Will let you know what happens.

 

[Billicus]

hexmonkey: Thanks for the advice, have run the repair app and we'll see what happens. We'll make a new user if necessary and try that.

Billicus: I wasn't aware there was a 6.2.9 version of AppleWorks - software update hasn't picked that up on this machine (unless of course it was a v.recent update - we only plug her iBook in to the 'net when she brings it to mine where we have a DSL connection). We've been on 6.2.7 until now. Thanks for the heads-up!

Will let you know what happens.

6.2.7 seemed very finnicky to me. 6.2.9 has solved those problems for me.

 

[HexMonkey]

Billicus: I wasn't aware there was a 6.2.9 version of AppleWorks - software update hasn't picked that up on this machine (unless of course it was a v.recent update - we only plug her iBook in to the 'net when she brings it to mine where we have a DSL connection). We've been on 6.2.7 until now. Thanks for the heads-up!

You'll need to get the UK version of the updater, as there are American English and UK English versions of AppleWorks (I don't think the UK updater appears in Software Update, I don't think it did for me). The updater can be found at the Apple UK site, with the download page here (Mac OS X version updater is 16 MB).