Trashing of preferences has become par for the course

Question

I have noticed with disquiet the ever increasing recommendation of trashing preferences in this forum. Is this the "universal cure" for ever so many things now?
This is very cumbersome and annoying for anyone, even when following Peter Spier's much referred to post.
Trashing of preferences should really be necessary only very occasionally, if at all. InDesign seems to "corrupt" all too easily.
Why has InDesign become such a mimosa? CS5 in particular. This forum is rather full with myriad problems in CS5 which seem to have little to do with the users.
Too many things in CS5 don't seem to work as expected especially when migrating older documents. Or, things which used to work fine in CS3 or CS4, now cause problems. The answers to these problems are often quite flippant.
I have been following all things InDesign CS5 assiduously for a while now as our studio should be getting CS5 very shortly.
Many posts are not encouraging at all.
The power of inx also seems gone with the new procedure in CS5.
Is all this progress? Were the new features brought to maturity properly?

Answer 1

A lot of issues seem to come down to preferences becoming corrupt. It's been a long time since this fix has done anything for any of my misbehaving documents.
Of course when there are issues and things aren't working as well as expected the two main fixes are the IDML export and the trashing of preferences.
I have to admit though, both of these two fixes haven't done anything for me in a while.
Only yesterday, I had a document that I couldn't change the paragraph style to edit the point size of my body copy. InDesign kept crashing. If that happened to me and I wasn't sure how to fix I'd post on here. Sure there would be an echoed "Reset your preferences and do the export to IDML".
But neither of these worked for me. Turns out the Master Text frame was corrupt. Thankfully, I have enough experience to troubleshoot misbehaving documents. I was able to copy and paste my text into another document and continue working just fine.
Resetting preferences is a necessary evil; in that it removes a lot of the things you spent time setting up ever so carefully. As I had created many styles common to my line of work, Headings up to 5 levels, Body with bullets based on, numbered lists, lettered lists etc.
But not all was lost, as I have a template file with all these headings listed and the paragraph and character styles precreated, with the corporate style guide for colours also exported to an ASE file. I can easily load up a number of styles and colours back into my pallete. Along with saving my workspace and updating it regularly and saving that workspace file to a safe location if it ever needs to be.
So yeh, there are times when you'll have to reset your preferences, or export to IDML - but that's not the be all and end all of fixing documents. I can understand how some people become frustrated. But you have to remember the documents are just data, lines and lines of code. It's going to get corrupted from time to time.
Just as a particular computer game, that is very popular, regularly crashes and also can damage the saved data file. It happens in a lot of software, a lot of platforms and to a lot of people.
The IDML export and the Reset Preferences has always been there as a route to get out of sticky situations. But you have to remember that it may not be the case that this will fix your issue.
So as a port of call, it's recommended you follow those steps. But if it doesn't work then there's something more at play and it's a process of elimination to find the wonky bit of the document that is causing the crash or ill effects.