Why are my wife's browsers messed up?
August 12, 2007 9:44 PM   Subscribe

All my wife's browsers are messed up. Please help.

We have an Intel iMac at home. I'm the admin. My wife is a user. The latest versions of Camino, Safari, and Firefox are installed. When I'm logged in, all browsers work fine. When my wife is logged in, all the browsers display pages very funky, usually in a narrow strip, centered, with only a bit of the top of the page showing and a looooong scroll down to any content. For example, on Flickr, you see the logo and nothing else unless you scroll down.

With the exception of Safari, which displays pages well but all login boxes are thin horizontal strips, so she can't log in to anything.

Ideas anyone?
posted by strangeleftydoublethink to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)
 
You have determined that the problem is only with the one user account.

The problem is almost certainly due to something under your home folder.

And it likely is something under ~/Library
( ~ = your home folder)

The most likely thing is a bad preference file under ~/Library/Preferences

You could start by removing the preference files for the apps you are having trouble with.

If the problem persists, you need to narrow the problem down - you could start by moving (via drag & drop) the whole "Preferences" folder that is under ~/Library to the Desktop, then log out and log in again.

A default copy of the Preferences folder will have been recreated.

Does that improve things?

If so, you could use a divide & conquer approach to figure out which of the preference files is causing the problem - move half of the preference files back into the Preferences folder, log out & in again, etc.

If the problem persists, try the same thing with the other sub-folders of ~/Library. E.g. with ~/Library/Caches, ~/Library/InputManagers, ~/Library/Fonts, ~/Library/PreferencePanes, ~/Library/Application Support, ~/Library/Application Enhancers, contents of ~/Desktop, etc.

Also remove any files owned by your user in /Library/Caches (the Library folder at the top-level of the drive) or the sub-folders of /Library/Caches (e.g. the font caches under /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS)
posted by B(oYo)BIES at 11:31 PM on August 12, 2007


Easiest thing to do is just make her a new account, move her documents and nuke the old one.
posted by IronLizard at 3:25 AM on August 13, 2007


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