Techsurvivors

Archives => 2003 => Topic started by: Jeremy Smith on March 02, 2003, 12:41:00 PM

Title: "Help Center" Help???
Post by: Jeremy Smith on March 02, 2003, 12:41:00 PM

I have recently updated to 10.2.4 on my G-4 and sometime between when I originally installed 10.2 and the update I seem to have lost most of the content in the Mac help center.   I am only able to view Mail, QuickTime and Palm Desktop help from the help viewer.  I have not installed anything else major that I can think of.  Software update originally installed the 10.2.4 update however I reinstalled the combo update a few minuets ago without any changes.  Any clues?

Title: "Help Center" Help???
Post by: pendragon on March 02, 2003, 03:08:00 PM

Jeremy,

First- A most hearty welcome to TechSurvivors. Only rarely is a problem not resolved so please hang in there.    

Second- Regarding the Help problem, apparently some have had success by doing the following:
1) Repair Disk Permissions
2) Quit Help, then throw out the file com.apple.helpui.plist, in /Users/<YourUserName>/Library/Preferences/com.apple.helpui.plist. Restart.

Please let us know if the above works.

Harv

Title: "Help Center" Help???
Post by: taliesin on March 02, 2003, 04:30:00 PM

Welcome, Jeremy.  
Good advice there. You may find another couple of Preference files:
com.apple.help.plist
com.apple.helpviewer.plist
These can also be deleted and will get re-created on a fresh launch of the Help Center after a reboot.
I'm wondering why this happened to you now. Some people had the problem when they first upgraded to Jaguar.

Title: "Help Center" Help???
Post by: Jeremy Smith on March 02, 2003, 07:16:00 PM

Thank you for the warm welcome!!  My father (Dolphin) has been bugging me to come to tech survivors for some time now.  I am usually able to hash through most problems using the help viewer.  Imagine my surprise when it was gone.

Well I have deleted all of the files mentioned above and repaired disk permissions.  Now when I open the help viewer and type in a topic it enters an endless search, which I stopped after almost an hour.  If I click on help center nothing happens.

Title: "Help Center" Help???
Post by: kps on March 02, 2003, 10:09:00 PM

Maybe this'll fix it...

Apple support doc

Strictly out of curiosity, have a look at what this contains:

/Users/user_name/Library/Caches/com.apple.helpui

But don't trash anything in Caches, I don't know if the OS will rebuild that directory.

Many help files can be found here:

/Library/Documentation/Help  (on the root level)

/Users/user_name/Library/Documentation/ (user's home directory)

That may be the problem, applications seem to install help files in various locations based on the developer's whim.

I've been lucky, I have no problems with the Help Viewer, but there are many others with the same issues as you.

Title: "Help Center" Help???
Post by: Jeremy Smith on March 03, 2003, 08:53:00 AM

Ok so I have tried all of the above with no luck...  It seems the help viewer was unable to find it's content or rebuild the files after I deleted them.  So I reinstalled OS 10.2 last  night and help viewer is back as it was!  

Thanks for all of the sugestions!!!

  I am now going to resume my original task of networking my printer.

Jeremy