The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    Serious trouble with iMovie crashing every time I try to launch it

    Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by karibik, Jul 30, 2008.

  1. karibik

    karibik Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    2
    Messages:
    35
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    15
    I'm running the most up to date OS X, with all updates offered by Software Updates. Today, when I tried to launch iMovie, the application appeared to start normally, but then a notification window came up, reading 'Camera detected - scanning contents'. After that, another such window appeared, reading 'Generating Thumbnails'. When the progress bar in that second window was about half way through, iMovie crashed. And crashed again upon the next time(s) I tried to launch it, with the exact same symptoms. After a couple of crashes I was offerfed to "Reset and relaunch', which i tried, but it didn't help. Unfortunately, there s no cancel button in the mentioned windows and hitting the escape key doesn't help.

    Of course, there is /no/ camera attached to my Mac, nor is /any/ external device, be it USB, FireWire or what ever. The only thing that is new/changed, that I can think of is the MobileMe update, offered recently by Software Update. Could that be the culprit? How would I get rid of it in order to test this?

    Update:

    With the help of Time Machine I restored my Mac to a state back in June, when even the 10.5.4 update wasn't installed - so MobileMe (and all other updates since then) is ruled out. Still the same. which is strange. Next will be a reinstall of OS X to rule out all possible software related 'wrongs'.

    Final update:

    After tinkering with various caches, pulling an older version of iMovie out of a Time Machine (TM) backup, restoring different versions of my installaton from TM and performing other useless things I decided to reinstall OS X from scratch, which finally solved the issue. Upon reinstall I was asked whether I'd like to transfer my accounts, settings and such from a TM backup which I did. After the first fresh start I installed my main apps like Fusion and Eye-TV and didn't even have to type in the serial numbers - it ws all there, even my desktop background picture - great!

    I then downloaded all the updates and iMovie still works fine, so that I don't have a clue what might have been wrong - which is the only bad thing since I don't know what /not/ to do in order to avoid the same problem to occur again. Thanks for reading, I didn't expect much feedback anyway, since this seems to be a rare issue.

    edit: I as wrong. Later today I was offerd more updates, and the problem is back. At least I can now track the cause down to only a few updates.
     
    karibik, Jul 30, 2008
    #1