I know Scott told you I was sick, but that's only part of why I was not tipping last week. A strange confluence of events conspired against me. For one thing, I sprained my back. I'm not sure how - it was either kickball or laser tag. The result was a steep decline in the number of hours I was able to sit at the keys.

Not coincidentally, last week was one of the busiest weeks I can remember. I had to finish both Jaguar updates -- The Little iTunes Book and Mac OS X For Dummies -- and put the nearly-finishing touches on the "iApps Bible" (or whatever it ends up being called), which Dennis Cohen is writing, with me along for the ride and snide comment or two...

On top of that, last Wednesday was my annual visit to Chicago's wonderful user group, TROU - The Rest oF Us. And though my back said "no," I had said "yes." So I went. And had a wonderful time as always, not to mention the tasty cuisine they exposed me to including the best pizza in the world, the original (not franchised) Pizzaria Uno.

Needless to say, I got little work done.

Anyway, I've rested up, and caught up (mostly) and am feeling fit as a fiddle. So let me just say thank you to everyone who wrote to express concern or wish me a speedy recovery or whatever. It was nice. Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming:

Here's the story. All of a sudden Final Cut Pro wasn't working. It launched just fine. And double-clicking a FCP project file worked. But it was all messed up - the File menu was dimmed completely so I couldn't start a new project or log new footage. A real mess.

Reinstalled FCP. No soap. Read the indexes of several books and all the FCP manuals, searched Help and Apple's Tech Support pages. Still no luck.

So I tried one of my old tricks -- I logged out as Bob and logged back in as "Fresh," the virgin never-used user account I keep around for troubleshooting. And when "Fresh" fired up Final Cut Pro, everything worked.

That told me it was almost certainly something residing in my Home folder that was causing the issue. Having been on this riverboat before, I suspected something in the Library, and more specifically, a preference file in Library/Preferences.

Sure enough, when I switched back to my usual identity (Bob) the issue returned.

So I tried another of my old tricks, made better by Jaguar - I searched the Preferences folder (using the handy search field in the Jaguar tool bar) for files and folders containing "Final Cut." I moved all of these files out of the Preferences folder and onto the Desktop, then launched Final Cut Pro.

Nope. Logged in and out to no avail. Restarted twice to be sure, but FCP was still broken.

It had to be something else. I racked my brain. Hmmmm... QuickTime? So I did the same with all the QuickTime-related prefs. But it was still broken.

All of a sudden it occurred to me... I didn't care which preference file was responsible, I just wanted to get the darn thing to work ASAP with as little hassle as possible.

(OK. I admit. I did want to know. It drove me nuts. But I didn't have time to worry about it just then.)

In the end I just took the whole Preferences folder and moved it to the desktop where I renamed it "Old Musty Preferences." I next created a new Preferences folder in my Library, then moved a few dozen preference files I knew I needed (and hoped weren't the culprit) from Old & Musty to the real deal (Home/Library/Preferences).

Which ones? Well... here are some of 'em:

Adobe (folder)
Adobe Photoshop 7.0 Settings
Adobe Registration Database
BBEdit Preferences
DragThing Settings
Explorer
Explorer (folder)
Explorer Control (folder)
Microsoft (folder)
Microsoft Keyboard.plist
MicrosoftKeyboardHelper.plist
QuickTime Preferences
Retrospect
StickyBrain.chronos.LC.plist
StickyBrainCM Preferences
at.obdev.LaunchBar.plist
com.adobe.Photoshop.plist
com.apple.loginwindow.plist
com.apple.internetconfig.plist
com.apple.loginwindow.plist
com.apple.mail.plist
com.barebones.bbedit.plist
com.cesoft.QuicKeys.plist
com.cesoft.quickeysbackgroundengine.plist
com.dantz.Retrospect.plist
com.kensington.mouseworks.background.plist
com.kensington.mouseworks.plist
com.microsoft.Word.plist
com.microsoft.explorer.plist
com.microsoft.keyboard.items (folder)
com.microsoft.keyboard.pref
loginwindow.plist

and so on. If I didn't want to spend time re-configuring, and I was relatively certain (or hopeful) this wasn't the preference causing my FCP issue, I copied it in.

Finally, I logged out and back in. Now for the moment of truth. And... YES! Final Cut Pro is whole again. The File menu does things it's supposed to again. Everything is good in the world again.

Over the next few days I move a few more files from the old musty preference folder on the desktop to my real one in my Home/Library. And I have had to reenter more than a few serial numbers. But overall it has been relatively painless and caused me only a little bit of downtime (cleaning up and re-doing things).

The good news is, a few days later things are running better than ever, with no system issues, and very few unexpected quits, even from apps known for quitting unexpectedly before I did my little Home cleaning. FCP has been perfect, too.

As an added benefit, I was able to get rid of literally hundreds of preference files I apparently didn't need. Pre-cleaning I had over 500 items in my Home/Preferences. Today I have a mere 130.

To sum things up: It's always nice to figure out exactly why a problem occurred. But there are times when getting back to work quickly, even knowing you'll have to devote a bit of time down the road to getting everything back to normal, is the way to go.

In this case, it was.

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Bob LeVitus is a leading authority on Mac OS and the author of 39 books, including Mac OS X For Dummies and The Little iTunes Book