Aperture won't launch a second time... must restart Mac

Question

I have a huge amount of photos; so many that I had to break the library down into several smaller ones.
Until yesterday, everything worked fine. I could open Aperture by double clicking on any library or switch between them with ease.
Today, however, things aren't working so well.
When I open Aperture for the first time after a fresh restart of my iMac, it works as you would expect. Library opens and it's business as usual. Problem is, if I try to switch between libraries or if I quit Aperture and try to open it again, I get a small dialog box saying:
"Opening Aperture Library" but the library never opens; eventually Aperture stops responding and I have to force quit. The only way to get Aperture to open after this is to restart the iMac.
http://screencast.com/t/zQhzTq0Zpy
followed by
http://www.screencast.com/users/richcirminello/folders/Jing/media/ec07a83d-ddd1- 4a2e-8c49-17e6c6d51beb
Here are a few things I have tried:
+ try opening a library from a different user account on the iMac: I am able to open, close, switch, etc... normally
+ connect the external hard drive with my libraries to a different Mac; same as using a different user account, Aperture seems to function normally
This leads me to believe there is something wrong wit my user account on the iMac.
My user account name is "rich"
I went into rich/Library/Application Support/Aperture and trashed everything. Unfortunately I have to reinstall my plug ins now (and all my watermarks, export settings and print settings argggh!), but that seemed only to help for a short time. After using Aperture for a few hours, the problem came back.
This is immensely frustrating!
I am using an iMac 27" 2.93GHz i7 with 8GB RAM, OS 10.6.6 and Aperture 3.1.1
Message was edited by: amorphic8
Message was edited by: amorphic8

Answer 1

amorphic8 wrote:
snip
This leads me to believe there is something wrong wit my user account on the iMac.
While I see the train of thought that led to that theory, you appear don't mention having tried a standard library trouble-shooting step. Have you used the "Aperture Library First Aid tools", as documented here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3805 ? If I was experiencing the problems you've described, I'd try the tools on both the Aperture library you work with initially and the one which you fail to be able to swap to later on.
One other thought occurs to me. It might be nothing, can easily be ruled out. Is it possible that this is (still) a disk space issue? And I mean either your boot drive or the external drive containing your libraries. How much space is free on each drive when you've got Aperture up and running? If you don't want to try the First Aid tools, it might be worth trying to remember to check the free disk space while Aperture is running - immediately before you finish with the first library.
I hope these thoughts put you on the road to a solution...
Regards,
GaryG