[arteggio]

I swear that iWork 9.1 update had evil in it.

Yesterday I tried opening up a an .avi in Quicktime 7 (I have Perian or whatever needed plugins), after opening it with VLC. It worked in VLC, but suddenly it would not work in QT 7 — the app wasn't frozen, but nothing would. . .work. No CMD+Q, no menu response, no closing a window. Hovering over the stoplights activates them, and then they get stuck there, unresponsive.

QTX has the same behavior. (And if I quit either app, they reopen with their previous windows even though I have that disabled (this is 10.7)). What really threw me off was, after the iWork update (all of this has occurred after that update), I could no longer add data to the cells of a spreadsheet in Numbers, even though the rest of the app worked (selecting cells, CMD+Q, etc).

SMART check (Disk Utility and the 10.7-wary Tech Tool Pro 5) came back fine. The disk verified in DU. So, I opened my admin account, and this same Numbers spreadsheet worked just fine.

I know that checking in another account is always suggested for app problems, but what's suggested after that? I've restarted plenty of times and repaired permissions twice. I've trashed and reinstalled iWork a few times now, updating to different versions along the way (9.04, 9.0.5, 9.1 again), and none of them work in my user account. The Quicktimes are still stuck (VLC is not), and Pages works just dandy.

This is the oddest, and probably worst, OS X problem I've ever had (at least relative to the spreadsheet work I need to do; I'm just going to open it on another computer since I don't have time to play around with this tomfoolery moment). I'm just hoping nothing else breaks.

Is the next step succumbing to the process of copying data over to a new user account? (Which I just did three weeks ago, with Lion — cough, I'll be buying it soon!)

Or, my other thought: doesn't the Lion install default to upgrading the system, leaving everything in place? I suppose the easiest next step would be to just reinstall the system and see if it fixes my account...

[curiousuburb]

Maybe a codec got updated in the admin account but got borked in others?

Doesn't really explain Numbers… unless some QT embed code in it got borked too?

Chart animation export or similar might be logical suspect in Keynote/Pages… but I'm still on Leopard and thus don't have latest Numbers to confirm.

*strokes chin*

[arteggio]

Let me join in with you by stroking my chin too.

Yesterday, tapping some keys in Pages did bring up text in a fresh document. Today I tested Keynote: unable to do text entry, like in Numbers. Pages is now the same way. Even though all of the toolbar and various button functions are accessible, along with menus. It's just the Quicktimes that refuse to respond to even mouse input.

In my main admin account, Quicktime X opens fine, though the movie that's currently 'stuck' in both QTs in my main account wouldn't open in the admin account. Keynote worked fine.

Fortunately, I still have Numbers accessible on 10.5 too.

Lion's downloading now. I suppose I'll venture into reinstalling it sometime...

[arteggio]

Lion reinstall: an amazingly simple process.

Results: where's the knock-head-wall smiley? Nothing has changed.

Both of the movies that were stuck in QTX were .avi, so deleting Perian prompted pop-ups on QTX's stuck-windows saying that a codec was missing, allowing me to close them. (Although QT7 informed me the same, it stayed unusable.) Deleting user preferences had no effect on either QT; now I've deleted QT7, and apparently the Apple installer for it abhors anything after Leopard. (Fortunately I safeguarded a copy of the app itself, but maybe it has its own problems in Lion anyway.)

iWork: can drag characters from character viewer. Cannot enter data via keyboard, either with my BT kb or OS X's keyboard viewer.

BUT! I got one Z to enter in Numbers, and actually, this is what happened the first time too. It's as if text input just cuts out...

Before reinstalling 10.7, Mail had a QT-iWork-like problem with a new message and an attachment. Now it's fine.

EDIT: Alas,it was my beloved BetterTouchTool.

[Dave]

Not knowing what BetterTouchTool was, I just checked out their website. The newest version (which was posted yesterday) is supposed to fix issues with iLife.