Puking on Prefs

I’ve been trying to get keychain syncing to work between my two Macs. You’d think that the login keychains would sync (especially since .Mac syncing is supposedly enabled), but they don’t. I decided to make a new keychain and try to get it to work.

I start using the Reset function to try to force synchronization. And for those interested, no, I still haven’t had any success getting keychain syncing to work. It’s way too hard to get working.

I digress. Suddenly, clocking the Reset Sync Data… button did nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. It did output something to the console log every time I clicked it.

2005-12-04 16:44:54.451 System Preferences[501] *** Assertion failure in -[NSMenuItem initWithTitle:action:keyEquivalent:], Menus.subproj/NSMenuItem.m:140

2005-12-04 16:44:54.455 System Preferences[501] Invalid parameter not satisfying: aString != nil

Awesome. System Preferences swallows up this error, leaving the user sitting there endlessly, futilely clicking the button, wondering why they aren’t being asked what to reset. Obviously, some preference or cache was all screwed up. Which one though?

Well, caches are easy. Just nuke them all. Naturally, that didn’t help. Next on the chopping block were Sync Services and System Preference preferences. No dice. I had to delete “com.apple.DotMacSync.plist” in Home/Library/Preferences and Home/Library/Safe Preferences. I’m fairly certain I’d already deleted the former, making me conclude that “Safe Preferences” is worthless. It’s just another place to delete preferences from. In this case, the problem seemed to be the fact that Transmit Bookmarks were in that p-list, but they weren’t in the syncing list anymore. I have no idea why, but there it is.