If I go to Preferences >Appearance>Inspector & Notes and go to change the colours, Scrivener crashes as soon as I click on the colour palette.
Does this happen to anyone else?
I haven’t seen a problem like that in a long time, but the last time I did, it’s because I had a third-party colour palette module installed that Apple had broken with some OS X update or another. You can check to see if you have any of those installed in the ~/Library/ColorPickers folder, or at the system level in /Library/ColorPickers. You may have to reboot after removing anything from those folders.
Hi Amber
No, the color pickers folder is empty
Okay, I’d check and see if you have issues with the system colour picker elsewhere, like in TextEdit or even Mail. If so, there may be some general troubleshooting you can look up to help fix it. If it seems to be Scrivener only, I would reinstall the software to make sure nothing is broken with it.
No such issues elsewhere
I removed scrivener (and emptied trash) then reinstalled it. When I opened it, 3 projects opened, none of which I was working on. Tried the color picker and same result, scrivener crashed.
Since this is a system tool, it would be a good idea to eliminate any external factors like corrupted system caches. Maintenance is a good tool for helping with that, I’d just run it with default settings, excluding the “web browser cache and history” and “obsolete, temporary and recent items”. Neither of those should have any bearing on this, and would be annoying to have reset.
If that doesn’t work, you could take a look at additional diagnostic information and see if the Mac is reporting anything unusual around the freezes. There are two things to do in order to acquire better information.
Turn On Debugging
- In the General: Warnings preferences pane, enable the “Show internal error alerts” message.
- If a window pops up at any point, simply copy and paste the error contents into a text file (TextEdit is fine). Create a new file each time this happens, and attach them all to your response.
Getting Log Info From The System
- Click on the Finder icon in the Dock
- Use the
Go/Utilitiesmenu command. - Double-click the Console icon.
- Click the “Errors and Faults” toolbar button to avoid a flood of routine messages. You could filter by 'Scrivener" as well, but since the colour picker is a system tool, it may be better to leave that off.
Now with both the debugging alerts enabled and the Console window open, switch back to Scrivener and reproduce the scenario. Did any messages get printed in the Console window? If so, just click on any one of them, press Cmd-A to select them all, and then copy & paste them into a response.
Testing Scrivener in a Clean Environment
It is also a good idea to try running Scrivener after a fresh reboot without anything else running in the background. You can achieve this by holding down the Shift key right after entering your password, and keeping it held down until fully logged in. Nothing but Finder should be running at this point, and thus testing Scrivener by itself like this will test against any third-party utilities you typically use in the background interfering with it. After this test, you would want to log out and back in to get your normal session running.
Thank you for your reply.
Not sure what happened. I downloaded and ran Maintenance as you suggested and my mac crashed. I managed to boot up and get everything back up and running and Scrivener no longer crashes when I use the color picker. 
Whew! I would say if you got a hard crash during a maintenance sweep, then that’s a good sign something was all twisted up in the system. Glad to hear it’s all sorted out and didn’t require any further Mac level troubleshooting.
Yes, it would seem to be the case.
Thanks again