I am helping out a friend with a very odd network issue.

The issue: When I click on system preferences and then networking system preferences freezes and becomes unresponsive, so much that I have to force quit. All I see from the system preferences pane is networking loading on top and then the beach ball of death.

I have tried everything in my geeky knowledge to fix it including:
-Reseting the system preferences plist in library
-fixing permissions in disk utility
-creating a second user account incase a background app was running
-going into user account and ending all startup apps
-copying com.apple.networkingutlity.plist from one mac and pasting it in his

What, other than reinstalling osx am I doing wrong. Of course he is still able to connect to the internet fine but this can lead to stability issues down the road.

He is running a 2 year old intel imac with 10.6 all up to date. He has att uverse, but that shouldn't make an issue. Please help.

I fixed it somehow. Had to delete most of the networking settings in the system folder in the library. Weird as all get out. Delete thread.

[Edited on December 18, 2009 at 10:29 PM. Reason : Fixed. ]

12/18/2009 10:07:52 PM

next time this happens, open up the Console application in the Utilities folder of the Application folder, and see what the logs say.

It was a corrupt file obviously, but you may have gotten this answer sooner.

12/19/2009 2:40:15 AM