Can't access system preferences

my system preferences is not accessible from the apple menu and it has a grey question mark on it in the dock

Back up all data.
Boot from your recovery partition by holding down the key combination command-R at the startup chime. Release the keys when you see a gray screen with a spinning dial.
When the Recovery desktop appears, reinstall the Mac OS. You don't need to erase the boot volume, and you won't need your backup unless something goes wrong. If your Mac didn’t ship with Lion, you’ll need the Apple ID and password you used to upgrade, so make a note of those before you begin.

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For the love of God!! Can't access system preferences.

My mom recently got a mac but we are new to it as we've always used Microsoft.
I've been trying to create an account for myself. I created it, and made it an admin, but it won't allow me to go into system preferences. Every time I click it, nothing opens. On my dock, the system pref. app is a question mark (?) and that wont open it either.
I am able to access preferences on the original user (my mom's user) but that doesn't help me at all.

Karawr wrote:
My mom recently got a mac but we are new to it as we've always used Microsoft.
I've been trying to create an account for myself. I created it, and made it an admin, but it won't allow me to go into system preferences. Every time I click it, nothing opens. On my dock, the system pref. app is a question mark (?) and that wont open it either.
I am able to access preferences on the original user (my mom's user) but that doesn't help me at all.
In that second account, when you visit the /Application folder, what does the icon for System Preferences look like? How are the privilege settings for it?

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Hello,
My System Preferences opens from the dock and from Finder, but not from the Apple menu.
Here's the read out from Console:
Mar 8 17:14:01 david-cains-computer crashdump[10475]: System Preferences crashed
Mar 8 17:14:01 david-cains-computer crashdump[10475]: crash report written to: /Users/davidcain/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/System Preferences.crash.log
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David
null

HI David,
*"I tried erasing com.apple.systempreferences.plist and relaunching Sys Pref from the Apple menu but without success."*
I'm not sure what you mean by "erasing" .. did you drag that .plist file to the Trash, empty the Trash and reboot?
Quit System Preferences.
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" The dock (?) at the bottom also has a bunch of question marks"
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Also hold the shift key after that upon boot, that will fix things
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3046
If you get into your account, see if system preferences opens and try to set the time and date, align with Apple's servers, reset the screen saver and desktop picture see if it holds upon a reboot
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com.systempreferences.plist
file in your
"User"/Library/Preference folder
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/Library/Preferences
and click OK
Then scoll down to the file above, there will be two of them perhaps, one is a lock file the other one you can Trash, so do that and reboot.

Can't access system preferences

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