System Preferences keep changing seemingly at random

osirhc

Registered
I have had my MacBook Pro for going on three years, I just reinstalled OS X using the disc that came with my computer and then updated to 10.6.8 in October.

I have one finger tap to click turned on as well as three fingers set to dragging, but just the other day I noticed that tap to click did not work. I didnt check my preferences at the time but then I noticed that dragging with three fingers didnt work either, so I double checked system preferences and noticed that tap to click was turned off and three finger was set to navigation (these are also the default settings I am pretty sure). My preferences are some of the first things I changed when I reinstalled and I havent touched those preferences in a few months, so it is very strange to me that these settings would randomly revert to default.

Then today I noticed that my Expose settings were also changed back to default, I have no touched them since I initially changed the settings after I reinstalled.

Is this a common theme with OS X? I have never ran into this quirk until now, I have owned three Macs in the past few years and none of them have ever done this to me. Unfortunately, the options for touchpad do not have the little "lock" option that other windows in preferences have, so I cannot prevent them from continuing to change.

I tried searching but could not find a match for my issue, my apologies if I posted in the wrong section I wasn't sure where else to post.
 
First, the preferences has been a weak point on Macs forever. They would often get trashed and "throwing away" the preferences was a common first step in fixing some new quirk that had crept in. Usually these were application preferences.

They are getting much better over the past few years but I just had a similar event that you describe happen to me. See: http://macosx.com/forums/mac-os-x-system-mac-software/322043-click-drag-stopped-working.html

I would do the usual things: 1) boot into the recovery partition and repair the disk http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4718 2) boot back up and repair the permissions.

The reason is it sounds like some of the settings files got whacked. A bad file system could do that. Its not hard now to verify / repair that. Better safe than sorry. Ditto for the permission settings.
 
First, the preferences has been a weak point on Macs forever. They would often get trashed and "throwing away" the preferences was a common first step in fixing some new quirk that had crept in. Usually these were application preferences.

They are getting much better over the past few years but I just had a similar event that you describe happen to me. See: http://macosx.com/forums/mac-os-x-system-mac-software/322043-click-drag-stopped-working.html

I would do the usual things: 1) boot into the recovery partition and repair the disk http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4718 2) boot back up and repair the permissions.

The reason is it sounds like some of the settings files got whacked. A bad file system could do that. Its not hard now to verify / repair that. Better safe than sorry. Ditto for the permission settings.


Thanks for the help! I will get on this immediately
 
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