HT1338 whenever I access my screen saver my computer freezes. Trying to change my background picture.

Question

Hey, I am trying to change my background picture but everytime I try my computer freezes.What do I need to do, help.
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I just did a little test and changed something in my Screen Saver settings and looked to see what changed (just had a Finder window open in my ~/Library/Preferences and had the "Date Modified" column selected so that the most recent change would appear at the top) and noticed that the file called com.apple.screensaver.xxxx.plist file changed (the xxxx is a hex number that is part of your UUID, or perhaps the whole UUID, as have seen it both ways). This screensaver preferences file is located in ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost which makes sense, as every user would need their own set of screen saver preferences on each host.
Looking at this file in TextWrangler it looks like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>askForPassword</key>
<integer>0</integer>
<key>idleTime</key>
<integer>300</integer>
<key>lastNonRandomModuleName</key>
<string>Flurry</string>
<key>moduleName</key>
<string>Flurry</string>
<key>modulePath</key>
<string>/System/Library/Screen Savers/Flurry.saver</string>
<key>tokenRemovalAction</key>
<integer>0</integer>
</dict>
</plist>
Hope that helps.
One thing I did have a question about is how to find the UUID. On a Mac Pro system the command:
system_profiler | grep -i uuid
returned the expected number that was part of the com.apple.screensaver.xxxx.plist file, but this did not work on a MacBook Pro. No luck trying to find out why so far. Anyone have any ideas? There is also a UUID associated with a disk volume, that appears to have nothing to do with the UUID associated with the system. So the UUID I'm talking about here is for the system, not a disk.
-Bob