Spinning Wheel of Death Fixed by Restoring System Preferences to Default with Tinkertool

I have experience problems with installing Mountain Lion. Oh, the install itself went fine. Initially, the desktop looked fine.

Then I made some changes to the System Preferences through the program TinkerTool. I needed to view the User Library, which Mountain Lion hides by default, in order to move folders into Application Support.

That’s when the problem started. When I started again, my cursor turned into the SPINNING WHEEL OF DEATH.

Now rebooting and holding down the Shift key to start in Safe Mode temporarily solved the problem. But I can’t run in Safe Mode all the time. I want to play music and access the Internet, too.

So, reaching the end of my patience, I thought “Maybe some change in the preferences caused this problem.” So I rebooted into Safe Mode and started Tinkertool again.

This time I used it to restore to system defaults.

When I rebooted, my cursor returned to normal and I breathed a sigh of relief.

So if you’ve installed Mountain Lion and made a few changes which caused the SPINNING WHEEL OF DEATH, that only rebooting in SAFE MODE fixes temporarily….try this fix.

Tinkertool will only affect the current user account. Read the instructions, as you could mess up your system, as you could with any utility software.

Tom Briant

Editor and Media Manager, MacValley UG.