TexEdit hangs on starting. Has to be forced off

Question

About 2 weeks ago TextEdit stopped working.  It hangs when it is invoked, and is using 100% of a cpu when it hangs.  Force quit reports it as being 'unresponsive'.  I've tried renaming the plist ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.TextEdit.plist but that had no effect (I've renamed it back).  Desperately hoping to cure the problem with a sledgehammer, I installed OSX 10.5 from the original CDs on another partition, selecting 'erase partition' and migrating across all everything from the old partition, but TextEdit hangs in the newly loaded system.

Answer 1

Not sure what's up with that situation, you could use a utility such as Pacifist
from Charlessoft company (should run in demo) to extract just the part of the
OS X you need, from the DVD, and put it on the desktop, and then it will help
you install just the part you need into the OS X system correctly. You cannot
drag & drop; and sometimes any migration attempt may be a failure.
http://www.charlessoft.com/pacifist_olderversions.html
Oh, with a plist, you may be able to simply trash it and when the application is
run again, that usually would be re-recreated. No point in re-naming, as that
won't fix an issue and does not help the system locate the correct file.
Did you test the issue by using a second user account to see if the real issue
was in a user permissions or sharing problem? Many applications have a
series of possible user and ownership settings, some of these get messed up.
You can check a second account as a base-line to test an existing account;
then it may be easier to move from a bad account into a new good one. If
your computer has only one user Admin account, you could try using a lesser
one on a daily basis, though that would mean you'd have to use the Admin
password when updating. Also, files may be harder to access when a different
user created them, unless you modify their ownership & permissions level.
TextEdit (as compared to TexEdit) is a system part. The latter name implies a
product that can be used such as TextWrangler can be used to write code or
modify scripts, etc. -- So the typo in your post header is a bit distracting...!
There must be some problem carried over from the old system or user files
that causes the issue with TextEdit. Do you have a backup bootable clone?
With a clone copy of a good basic system, you can re-clone it into the Mac
from an external enclosure suited to that purpose; sparing you from re-install
of everything from scratch, avoiding downloads or finding old CD/DVD media.
Hopefully you can resolve the issue. A fully new installation may be needed.
On an erased and reformatted hard disk drive. Test the HDD. It may be a
source of corruption, as they do wear out and that can affect sectors, etc.
Good luck & happy computing!