I’ve had my MacBook now since September and I really like it.  Apple has a good thing going. That said, some things about OS X are strange, such as you can’t see certain parts of your filesystem with Finder unless you a) resort to some odd Terminal commands that need to be flipped on and off depending on how much of your filesystem you want to see or b) get a wonderful piece of software such as Xfolders to let you see everything when you need to.  Xfolders is great. It was one of the first things I downloaded and installed when my MacBook still smelled new.

Then I did something stupid: I upgraded to OS X 10.5 Leopard.  I haven’t had as much trouble as some who have taken the plunge, but one side effect was that in Leopard, Xfolders would crash anytime I tried to click on the root drive (cheerfully known as Macintosh HD on my MacBook). No matter which pane I clicked on, attempting to access root would bring up the OS X crash log.  Oh the horror! I may as well be running Vista! :)  After much agonizing and digging around, I found the solution to the problem:

1. Open a new Terminal window
2. type rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.kai-heitkamp.Xfolders.plist and press Return

That’s it! I’m not sure why, but sometimes, Leopard can corrupt the Xfolders configuration file, which causes Xfolders to crash upon launching.  By simply deleting this configuration file in your home directory, Xfolders can once again give you easy access to viewing 100% of your files whenever you need to.  I hope this helps someone!

Author’s Note (February 18, 2008):  I have some reports that this was a problem with Xfolders on some versions of OS X prior to 10.5.  This fix may work for OS X 10.4 Tiger sometimes, too!