I've had an intermittent, weird problem in iChat since going to 10.7. First happened in 10.7, still happens in 10.7.3.
iChat status sets randomly to some gibberish text.
Either total gibberish or random characters (and not just using Latin alphabet but often Chinese too), or often it shows some random email address - never of people I know. When the text goes gibberish, it shows the same gibberish for all my friends (or at least several friends have shown me the same message when it happens). Quite a few times it's shown someone's gmail or me/mac. email address, but never of people I would have known or recognized from anywhere.
Changing iChat status does not fix it. Killing imagent in Terminal fixes it as it forced also iChat to restart. I usually also kill ~ iChat caches after that.
Yet it comes back, sometimes after a week or a few, today it kept happening past several iChat restarts.
So far I haven't noticed this happening for my other friends, or them have seen it for other friends.
Let's see, what else... nothing interesting in console prior to or or around when it happens.
I only use one iChat account, and it's of the classic @mac.com type, however I don't use the same account for FaceTime. I don't use other account at the moment, and bonjour is disabled as it's not needed. So no google or other accounts. Just one account, and that's iChat only.
The preferences for the account is to keep the status as it was when I come back from "away", and that in itself hasn't been an issue for this behavior (I've kept that preference that way on all my Macs since 10.2 and iChat first was released).
And I don't have more than about 20 fonts (verified them too), plus the only place where this garbage happens is in iChat status.
Also I've got no iChat add ons, and I don't use other chat clients or protocols on this Mac (other than occasionally Skype but which I haven't used on the Mac for a while either)
The only relevant stuff getting in console logs is
but even that is left empty. Could not change to what? And when I didn't even want to change it to anything. It happens when I'm not changing it, so something wants to change it to something else. What calls for it? There's nothing more in system.log telling what called imagent in the first place or why.
I'm not sure if it happens only on this one Mac since I tend to use the iChat only on the same Mac. I guess I could try with the same AIM account on a different system and switching this Mac to have a different iChat account for a while to see if would happen for the other accounts too.
It's more of a curiosity of why this is happening but still... have you seen anything similar? I add below a few screenshots as how my status appeared for the others today afternoon, past several imagent restarts (it did change it, but it went to the next gibberish shown in the images). What it was supposed to be set for was "I've got a thesaurus and I'm not afraid to use it" as an away status. No clue when it switched it, but at least yesterday it was fine. Ideas?
iChat status sets randomly to some gibberish text.
Either total gibberish or random characters (and not just using Latin alphabet but often Chinese too), or often it shows some random email address - never of people I know. When the text goes gibberish, it shows the same gibberish for all my friends (or at least several friends have shown me the same message when it happens). Quite a few times it's shown someone's gmail or me/mac. email address, but never of people I would have known or recognized from anywhere.
Changing iChat status does not fix it. Killing imagent in Terminal fixes it as it forced also iChat to restart. I usually also kill ~ iChat caches after that.
Yet it comes back, sometimes after a week or a few, today it kept happening past several iChat restarts.
So far I haven't noticed this happening for my other friends, or them have seen it for other friends.
Let's see, what else... nothing interesting in console prior to or or around when it happens.
I only use one iChat account, and it's of the classic @mac.com type, however I don't use the same account for FaceTime. I don't use other account at the moment, and bonjour is disabled as it's not needed. So no google or other accounts. Just one account, and that's iChat only.
The preferences for the account is to keep the status as it was when I come back from "away", and that in itself hasn't been an issue for this behavior (I've kept that preference that way on all my Macs since 10.2 and iChat first was released).
And I don't have more than about 20 fonts (verified them too), plus the only place where this garbage happens is in iChat status.
Also I've got no iChat add ons, and I don't use other chat clients or protocols on this Mac (other than occasionally Skype but which I haven't used on the Mac for a while either)
The only relevant stuff getting in console logs is
Code:
3/1/12 1:30:42.056 PM imagent: [Warning] [AIM] Could not change my statusURL tobut even that is left empty. Could not change to what? And when I didn't even want to change it to anything. It happens when I'm not changing it, so something wants to change it to something else. What calls for it? There's nothing more in system.log telling what called imagent in the first place or why.
I'm not sure if it happens only on this one Mac since I tend to use the iChat only on the same Mac. I guess I could try with the same AIM account on a different system and switching this Mac to have a different iChat account for a while to see if would happen for the other accounts too.
It's more of a curiosity of why this is happening but still... have you seen anything similar? I add below a few screenshots as how my status appeared for the others today afternoon, past several imagent restarts (it did change it, but it went to the next gibberish shown in the images). What it was supposed to be set for was "I've got a thesaurus and I'm not afraid to use it" as an away status. No clue when it switched it, but at least yesterday it was fine. Ideas?
