A Shadow Appears Only Then (Adium Problem)

[SakuraRosalie]

Okay, so here's the story: Last night, I got home from my friend's house and volunteering, and come onto my computer to check the Adium I usually leave on, for messages. I move the mouse to go over to Safari, and then, suddenly, a shadow appears almost halfway (coming vertically) down my screen and freezes everything. Thinking maybe it was just because I left Adium on since Friday, I hit the button on the back of my Mac Mini (after a few minutes of mouse banging) and reboot.

I decide to go into Adium first, next time I try, about ten minutes later. The computer does the same thing. Hit button. Reboot. I do this again, before I kick on anything else. The whole shadow goes across the screen and a book with the reboot button appears, telling me to restart my Mac.

I've done a combination of things. I've tried holding down my mouse button as it's going on, I've tried exiting out of my keychain pass box until it asked me for my Yahoo and MSN pass (until it froze mid-type), and I've tried leaving Adium off for about twenty-four hours.

If it helps, my Mac version is 10.5.5 Mac Mini (or OSX), and I believe my Adium version is 1.3.2 debug. I have a parental controls thing on my computer, but I don't believe that would have effected it (then again, anythings possible).

What do you suggest I do?

And if anyone else has had this problem and solved it, can you help me?

Many thanks in advance. xo

[DRabbit]

The above post is from my daughter...

I have been trying to fix this for her today and have had no luck... tried deleting preferences. Tried deleting application and reinstalling (latest version, not debug). Parental Controls ARE enabled on her computer but with little restriction (just time), but I read somewhere else from someone having crash/lockup issues with Adium when Parental Controls are enabled... however, it WAS working fine up until this past Sunday (and parental controls were enabled long before that). She's running Leopard.

Once we attempt to open Adium the whole system completely locks up and the Apple message "You must restart your computer" appears. The shadow my daughter was talking about above is SOMETIMES the Apple error message doesn't appear and it locks up just prior to it showing on the screen... it locks up midway through getting ready to display the restart error message.

Anyone have any ideas? In the meantime she's using iChat but that doesn't allow Yahoo or MSN login...

[DRabbit]

Just thought I'd respond that I think Yahoo is the problem. After a little more research, completely deleting all Adium related files from the system and reinstalling, it's fine, as long as I don't put a YahooID in there. For whatever reason, that seems to muck it all up.

[David Munch]

For what it is worth, it is a Kernel Panic you are describing. Seems odd that Adium is causing it though.

[DRabbit]

Seems to be the combination of Adium, OS X Parental Controls and trying to connect to Yahoo. It's also new, just since this past weekend. Yahoo seemed to be down for maintenance over the weekend (others were reporting problems connecting) so I wonder if they've changed something, since we were having no problems prior. However, one of the ways I figured it out was searching around the net and discovering another person with the problem (link below). It might only be new for us because my daughter only added her YahooID recently.

http://www.macupdate.com/users/draftech (user who had same problem)
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/6366 (original review)

Luckily, my daughter only has one friend using Yahoo, so I just told her not to add her YahooID... at least for now.

[sidney]

This has been going on for a while and apparently nobody connected it to the use of parental controls. See bug #8488 at http://trac.adium.im/ticket/8488

The problem appears to happen when you have parental controls enabled, and a Yahoo! Messenger account enabled in Adium, and the Yahoo! Messenger account has set (under Contacts | Display Image menu in Yahoo! Messenger) the display image to be an upload image that is larger than 64x64 pixels.

If you don't want to disable use of the Yahoo! Messenger account in Adium preferences, change the display image in Yahoo! Messenger to Avatar or a smaller image file.

[boredzo]

This has been going on for a while and apparently nobody connected it to the use of parental controls.

Except for the person who connected it to the use of parental controls, who would be me…