Help not Helping!
The Help tool on my MacBook is having problems. When I search for anything using Help in the menu bar, the search window opens but the spinning beachball appears and for over 30 seconds nothing happens until I get a timeout in a small window with a message saying "Connection Failed - The server may not exist or it is not operational at this time. Check the server name or IP address and your network connection and try again". The correct help information then appears.
I have tried trashing the following preferences :
com.apple.help.plist
com.apple.helpviewer.plist
and also trashed com.apple.helpui from the Caches folder
I think it is a network problem as if I go to Terminal and ping the Apple server employed by Help Viewer I get 100% packet loss
ping -c 20 helposx.apple.com
PING helposx.apple.com (17.149.160.23): 56 data bytes
--- helposx.apple.com ping statistics ---
20 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss
Unknown-00-23-6c-80-21-66:~ tony$
I don't have any other network problems so am not sure what is wrong here?
Any ideas (this is a new MB, I migrated from a PB where I had a similar issue and think I have imported a rogue setting/pref)?
Thanks
Tony
I'm having the exact same issue! Did you figure out the cause for your situation?
Prior to today I changed a h/d on another Mac on my LAN which I usually have mounted most of the time. I repurposed that h/d and so the name of that drive is no on my LAN anymore. Instead I have a new h/d with a different name. Then whenever I tried to bring up the Help Viewer it would display a popup dialog saying that that particular drive (the one I removed) could not be found. What is odd is I have no idea what that drive had to do with my local MacBook Pro's Mac OSX 10.5.5 Help Viewer trying to run. If I clicked on that dialog's OK button it would reappear a few seconds later. If I clicked on it about 15x it eventuallly went away and the help viewer worked fine.
Today it started displaying the dialog you mention... "Connection failed - The server may not exist or it is not operational at this time. Check the server name or IP address and your network connection and try again." My internet access is working fine for my web browser. My email access for Mail app is fine.
I have no idea what "server" it refers to, where that server lives, or how do I fix this problem. I have done searches on the Apple support site and come up with nothing. I don't have a clue what has gone wrong. What server is this app talking to? Is it going out on the internet to the Apple site and if so, why doesn't the Help Viewer able to talk to it when the web browser and email works fine???
Help!
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