Major system problems

Question

When running spellcheck with appleworks, my system displayed the message:
the main spell dictionary is not installed
I had this problem before, and went through the steps that worked before (getting rid of Preferences and Recent Items in appleworks). Doing this did not clear the problem.
So, I decided to restart the system to see if that would help. After the restart, the system had the following problems:
1. the dock was reset
2. sticky keys were turned off
3. the username to retrieve mail has been reset.
4. safari hung, so I ran firefox, which got the following messages:
Well, this is embarrassing.
Firefox is having troubles recovering your windows and tabs. This is usually caused by a recently opened webpage.
You can try:
o Removing one or more tabs that you think may be causing the problem
o Starting a new browsing session
(starting a new session worked.)
5. netscape worked.
6. spellcheck within appleworks still doesn't work, but it does work within applications
7.. and most important my keychain seems to be gone, and TimeMachine can't find it. This is a real problem, since I had about 200 entries in my keychain all with unique passwords. I'll have to invoke the forgot my password on each of these sites, assuming I have someway to get my username.
I still can't set up mail to automatically retrieve my mail, but I can manually log onto the server. I know I can manually setup mail to copy the manual login.
BTW, safari is now working; it was a transient problem, maybe related to a problem at my homepage, nytimes.com
Any thoughts? Thanks.

Answer 1

You may have a couple unrelated issues going on.
If you recently updated Flash, make sure you've repaired permissions, maybe even twice. I had a similar experience recently with pages that relied on a lot of Flash content - Netscape may not be current enough to have these issues, but Safari, Camino, FF, and Flock all crashed until I repaired permissions twice.
As to AppleWorks...I still use it, but just be aware that support for it could vanish. I'd try to reinstall it first. I would seriously consider making new documents from your AppleWorks files in MS Office, Open Office, Google apps, or some other app of your choice. It's possible that at some point OS X stopped supporting AppleWorks altogether. This is just speculation, but since it hasn;t been updated for years now, it's worth being cautious.