Tiger Help Viewer very flakey

[DerChef]

I think there have been posts on this before.

Mac Help quite often hangs when searching or wont display answers. Problem is it not only screws the help in the application you are in but in other native tiger apps that use the Help Viewer.

Tried zapping its 3 preference files, zapping its cache, searching for dodgy fonts. (all the stuff on it I can find in Apple support).

There does not seem to be any help books in my Documentation folder to zap.

Only thing that brings it back is the reset help in onyx.

Any ideas anybody.

Only bug in my system I can find at the moment

 

[mduser63]

The help viewer in OS X really sucks, it's not just you. I have the same problems as you on my machines, both in Tiger and Panther (Tiger is worse).

 

[Apple]

My viewer is retarded too. It wont let me bring up anything. I guess if I ever have a problem I could go to apple's site

 

[stridey]

Yeah, somewhere between Jaguar and now the Help Viewer became totally useless (not that it was the greatest to begin with).

 

[mkrishnan]

It sounds like you've followed a lot of the steps already, but have you looked at this:

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/helpviewer.html

It suggests that, sometimes, when these issues crop up, it's because of a corrupted disk structure, which needs to be addressed by repairing the disk using a system install DVD / using fsck using single-user mode (effectively the same thing). And it has a few other tricks that might not have been on the Apple pages.

It's frustrating that the help in OS X is so bad. I'm really surprised. Especially considering it had at least minor upgrades into Tiger (such as the Spotlight searching). So if people are adjusting the code, why aren't they making it work? Especially considering how simple it is.

 

[DerChef]

One thing I can add

Playing with Help viewer today noticed that it does not grind to a halt nearly as often if you untick

Include Product support searches