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Simple cure for Mac crash/password problems

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg14627] Simple cure for Mac crash/password problems
• From: sidles at u.washington.edu (John Sidles)
• Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 13:46:57 -0500
• Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
• Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

I originally posted this under the subject "corrupted notebooks", but I
received several highly favorable responses by email & so thought  it
should be posted with a more apt subject heading, specifically
mentioning its utility as a cure for Mac crashes.  As one respondent
said: "It can't be that easy, can it?"

> I too was among the many people pagued by
> repetitive Mathematica 3.0 crashes on my Mac --
> until I found the magic cure of write-locking
> Mathematica's "init.m" file in my System
> Preferences folder.
> 
> This cured an incredibly irritating and recurrent
> problem where I had to contact Mathematica about
> once per month to reset my digital time stamp.
> 
> It also cured a problem (perhaps related) where
> Mathematica set the default Image Bounding Box
> variables to illegal values, then stored these
> values in the Preferences init.m file.  Once this
> happened, crashes soon followed.
> 
> Nowadays, if I need to change global default
> values, I *temporarily* unlock init.m, start
> Mathematica, change the values, then immediately
> quit Mathematica, and relock init.m before
> continuing.