Address Book (Sharing) Preferences hang

Hi,
I've been wrestling with this problem for a few months now and have been unable to resolve it.
Problem
When I am in Address Book.app and select "Preferences" I get a spinning beach-ball of death. Eventually the preferences will appear. If I then select 'Sharing' I will once again get a spinning beach-ball that will eventually go away but the sharing preferences don't (usually) appear. At that point I also get an error in my console.log;
2007-08-03 13:41:23.998 Address Book\[3063\] Read attempt failed (1,60)
I have also seen additional errors;
2007-08-03 13:18:00.431 Address Book\[2810\] Could not find image named 'QuestionMark'.
2007-08-03 13:19:34.256 Address Book\[2810\] Caught Read attempt failed (1,60)
Additional information
* I was running AddressX and have now removed it in case it was in some way related to this problem.
This error occurs on the other account I have on my MacBook pro too.
I am running an up-to-date 10.4.10
I have no items in the 'Sharing' preference pane on either of my accounts.
I did have 'Sync with Exchange' ticked on one of the accounts (on which I have never used the address book). I have now unticked that option and the problem remains.
Things I have tried
1- I have verified my disk. No problems reported.
2- I have run 'plutil ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.AddressBook.plist' and it came back OK.
3- I removed each of the 3 .plist files in ~/Library/Preferences/ in turn, logged out and in again and recreated the problem each time.
4- I removed the (Adium) add-in scripts that were in ~/Library/Address Book Plug-Ins/ and the problem still occurs.
5- I removed the (Skype) plugins in /Library/Address Book Plug-ins/ and the problem still occurs.
I wonder if there are any kind souls out there who can suggest any further debugging steps I could take to resolve this?
Thanks in advance.
chown -R us ./base
Niall

Austin,
The fonts validated OK so I removed Address Book.app plus the preferences using AppDelete. This deleted all the relevant files including the .data file that actually holds the address book.
Whilst I was downloading the combo updater (even before I reinstalled the 10.4.8 version of AB) an iSync window popped up telling me that it was syncing and going to add 2 new addresses and delete 1189 (the number of addresses I have). I cancelled the sync. This was a surprise to me as I don't run iSync usually- I guess MacOS X maintains a separate address book somewhere.
Anyway- long story short- after the reinstall and update back to 10.4.10 AB is working fine. Thanks!
I still can't figure out what the Sync window was that popped up and how AB reinstalled with my full address book, but the world is a good place again. Thanks.

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Hello Finch42
Welcome to Apple Discussions
I do just the opposite, I use Yahoo mail for handling all my mail and not Mac mail.
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