Hi. Ever since I updated my mac software to the now much-hated OS 10.8.2, sometimes–not always–when I try to open Scrivener (2.3.1) I get the crash reporter saying “Scriv. crashed the last time it was used,” and the form with steps one and two of “tell us what you were doing when it crashed.” I also get the spinning beach ball of death which will not allow me to access the form. Eventually the program shuts down only to repeat this when I try open it again. HELP.
Hasn’t happened to me, but you might try this:
- Run Disk Utility to fix all file permissions
- or use the free utility Onyx to fix that and clean up system clutter.
- then shut down and reboot the computer
Sounds like there’s a corrupt file somewhere that is blocking the launch sequence.
Thank you for your reply and sorry I haven’t gotten back to you; we were out of town. Of course running Disk Utility and shutting down was the first thing I did. It’s still doing it.Any other suggestions? Hmmm, the corrupted files sounds like it might be an issue. How would I go about discovering which one and/or repairing files? Or, should I consider backing everything up, uninstalling Scrivener, and downloading it again?
My trouble-shooting advice, 
- Create a new user account and try opening Scrivener in there:
a) if it doesn’t run there, download a new copy, delete the old one, and instal the new copy;
b) if it does run there, shut it down and go back to your normal user account.
- In my experience, the most commonly corrupted files are the preferences files.
In your normal user account, try moving aside your preferences file, in users/youraccount/library/preferences/com.literature… When I do this sort of thing I simply put them on my desktop, as I keep that clean of icons normally; but just move the files out of the preferences folder to wherever you can find them easily — you may have more than one .plist for Scrivener and a Lockfile, just move them all, Scriv will create new preference files when you start it up again — and then re-start Scrivener holding down the shift key, to ensure it starts without opening projects that were open the last time you closed it:
a) if it runs:
i) open each of those projects in turn until one crashes it … that project will be the corrupt one. Send it to support at L&L;
ii) if none of them crash it, it was one of the preference files that was corrupt, so re-enter your licence details — you have got them somewhere, haven’t you? 
— and you’re good to go, though you may have to do some tweaking through the preferences to get it the way you want again;
b) if it doesn’t run, delete the current installation, download and re-instal:
i) if it still doesn’t run, get in touch by email with the gurus at L&L;
c) if it runs now, move aside the new .plist files in the library one by one, dragging your original ones back in, and see if it runs. If it does with them all back in, you won’t have to do the tweaking.
If you don’t know how to get to your library folder, go to Finder, hold down the key and click on the menu … you’ll find Library listed — for convenience, I’ve dragged it into the sidebar of a Finder window, so I can always access it easily from there.
HTH
Mark
EDIT: of course back-up first … but you do that on a regular basis, don’t you?
EX-cellent advice and very detailed. Thank you, xiamenese. Scrivener seems to be running fine again after opening and shutting it numerous times, but I do plan to keep your very helpful advice in my techie help folder. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
My pleasure,
Mark