[sjonz]

Lately every time I open an application's Help file (i.e., select Help from the menu) -- any app, even Apple's own -- I get a message that says "helpd quit unexpectedly." Sometimes I get this even if I'm not opening up an app's help file; it just suddenly appears. Does anyone have any idea why this is happening? What is "helpd" anyway, some kind of root-level application?

I tried all the regular things: verified the HD using Disc Utility, repaired permissions, ran Cocktail, logged out and back in, rebooted, etc., but nothing rectified the problem. Through a Google search, I found someone who seems to have had a similar problem, and he said deleting this help him: ~Library/Caches/com.apple.helpd. But I'm not clear if I should delete the entire com.apple.helpd folder, or just the Cache.db and/or HelpCache.plist documents in the folder. There is another folder in the com.apple.helpd folder called "Generated" that is full of what appears to be help files from many applications (not just Apple's), so am worried that deleting that would be a bars idea.

Can someone give me some guidance on this problem (i.e., what's going on and how to solve it)? I have a screenshot of the crash report, but can't figure out how to attach it to this posting

(I'm running OS X 10.7.4 on a core 2 duo iMac with 4 gigs of RAM, but it doesn't seem to matter how much memory I'm using or how many applications are open.)

Thanks,

Steve Jones
Baltimore, MD

This post has been edited by sjonz: 28 May 2012 - 02:54 PM