Weird weird problem with screen display

[-Monkey-]

Hi,

Hopefully someone else will already have come across this problem and save me tearing the rest of my hair out!

One of our Mac user's Apple Cinema display appeared to be faulty. The whole screen looked very contrasty and graduated tints were blocky in appearance, rather than smooth. Tried replacing the screen with a known good one. Re-calibrating the screen in Preferences Display made no difference either. Set colours to millions, res to 1900 x 1200 etc. I even swapped out the graphics card from another machine - still no change.

Conclusion was that either the screen was on it's way out or there's a motherboard or slot problem. Anyway, when I incidently logged the user out and logged in as Admin, all of a sudden the display was perfect. Logged back in as the user, problem returned.

So, I then go through his prefs and remove anything that looked remotely to do with screen settings - no change. Repaired permissions on the HD - no change. I've now fiddled for hours and can think of nothing else to try, short of re-installing everything (pleeeeeease, Noooooo!).

It's a G5 running Panther 10.3.9. Could I try recreating the user's account, without having to re-install all his apps and settings?

Any suggestions please anyone? It must be something like a prefs or profile thing, but I haven't a clue what.

Thanks.

 

[fryke]

The apps should be no problem, really. The preferences you can archive and then take over one by one. You also have to make sure to look in "~/Library/Application Support" of course. And if an app _should_ still have a hickup, you might have to reinstall it all the same...

But it certainly _sounds_ like a miscalibrated monitor profile... Can you just choose another to see if it's better?

 

[-Monkey-]

The apps should be no problem, really. The preferences you can archive and then take over one by one. You also have to make sure to look in "~/Library/Application Support" of course. And if an app _should_ still have a hickup, you might have to reinstall it all the same...

But it certainly _sounds_ like a miscalibrated monitor profile... Can you just choose another to see if it's better?

Thanks for the help. I'll try recreating his account tomorrow. Don't know if it's significant but I recently upgraded his Adobe CS to CS2. Illustrator CS2 keeps coming up with spurious low memory type errors on launch. [still, what do I expect with v x.0.0 of anything?]. The display problem roughly seems to coincide with the upgrade, though I can't imagine how/why that should affect the overall display behaviour, even when CS2 hasn't been used since boot. Nonetheless, some apps do fiddle with system settings, so maybe not so far-fetched after all?

Re the monitor profiles:already tried that I'm afraid. Chose Apple RGB (as opposed to Apple Cinema HD) and went right through the advanced calibration. No improvement at all. Logging in as Admin again did the trick - perfect display.

I'll let you know what happens...