Contextual Menus broken after Panther upgrade

mweier

Pixel Farmer
After using an iBook for a long time under Jaguar, we've finally upgraded to Panther. Everything went smoothly (albeit slowly) and the upgrade successfully completed. The only customizations I did in upgrade were to not include printer drivers and add X11.

Now that it's done & fully system updated to latest stuff, my Contextual Menus (rt-click and/or control-Click) seem broken! at first i thought it was the mouse drivers, so I installed latest Logitech drivers. This didn't change anything. Then I removed the mouse from the USB port & found that control-click does same thing.

Basically when trying contextual menu on a file/folder in Finder, it doesn't show the menu & instead relaunches the finder. This happens about 1 in 3 attempts. The other attempts it does nothing.

any tips? I'd prefer not to do a clean install unless I have to. Thanks!
 
Do you have any other third party enhancer installed? Did you run disk Utility to verify and repair permissions? That is recommended after an install.
 
no third party enhancers, but I'll try to run disk Utility to verify & repair permissions... thanks for the suggestion!
 
well thanks anyways - while it did find a few things to fix (and fixed them) after doing so, the finder still relaunches when a contextual menu opens most of the time. Other programs don't have this happen so it's definitely a finder thing.

I've noticed elsewhere on macosx.com that someone else had a context menu item which was freaking it out (fruit menus or something?). In my finder context menu, the only non-apple things are related to toast and stuffit expander - any ideas on how to uninstall them?

thanks!
 
You can try deleting the Finder's preference file at
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist
where ~/ means your home directory.
 
Your Contextual Menu items will be here;

user>library>Contextual Menu Items

or here

library>Contextual menu Items

or here

System>library>Contextual Menu Items
 
Thanks, Bobw (ironicallly my dad's name is Bob W, and he would have no idea about anything mac :). I'll try fiddling with the finder contextual menu items to see if that fixes it. I know that there may have been some toast issues due to the timings of upgrading to 10.2 and then 10.3 as well as upgrading toast to 6 somewhere in there too. probably some bad Roxio Mojo.

I've already tried deleting Finder prefs - it didn't help.
 
When you installed Panther, did you do an upgrade or an archive and install? If you did an upgrade, then that is the problem.

Try again, this time do an archive and preserve install. You will get a fresh new OS folder.
 
good cally, Cheryl - I did an upgrade. this "archive & preserve install" is the equivalent of the old "Clean Install", then?

I'm gradually learning OSX intricacies as I dropped off the Mac bandwagon around OS9 and have only recently managed to be the prodigal compy user with access to jaguar & later.
 
I have Panther sitting here next to me. I just might begin the process of installing now that I have read and learned from here the tricks.
Yes, Archive and preserve is the equivalent of clean install.
 
Cheryl said:
I have Panther sitting here next to me. I just might begin the process of installing now that I have read and learned from here the tricks.
Yes, Archive and preserve is the equivalent of clean install.
Send me a PM if you'd like some tips on installing Panther. Hopefully you can learn from my experiences. Or, just make a thread, I'm sure lots of people have advice for upgrading.

Sorry if this is off-topic...
 
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