Quark Forums

After having been using my Quark 6.52 application for several years, I tried opening it this morning and got the following error message. The application preferences file is damaged. Please remove it and relaunch QuarkXPress. [296] What does this mean? I looked into the application file to find the preferences file...with no success...to remove it. I was then planning on relaunching the application with the expectation that it would open successfully. Where do I find the preferences file? Please provide any other information that you know I will need to successfully transact this protocol. Thank you.

Hello,

 Preferences folder is located at the following location:

MAC:

HDD//Users//your user(User with house icon)//Library//Preferences//Quark

Windows

My Computer/ C Drive //Documents and Settings//your User name//Application Data//Quark//QuarkXPress 6

Either clear the contents of the folders as given above or rename the folders contained with the folders at the above locations.

I hope this helps!

 

Hey, Thanks for the reply. So sorry for the additional work because I did not tell you that I'm working with a MAC. But you tried to answer it both ways. Thanks again. Now, please forgive me for being a user and not much more than that. I'm thinking that when you say that I should "clear" the contents, that means select the items (.prf files) in the folder and drag them to the trash. Besides the ".prf" files, there are three folders. 1) "Install", 2) "MRU", and 3) "PPD". Do these also get selected and trashed as well. Once all the items have been trashed. I do a restart of the computer and then open QuarkXPress? Thanks again for your assisstance.

 

The application preferences file is the one named XPress Preferences.prf; chances are that is the only damaged one, based on the error. I would pull that, but I don't recommend you toss it straight in the trash even though it is probably damaged; whenever you pull files like this it's a good idea to put them in a folder where you can hang on to them until you're sure you didn't throw away something you need. You do not need to restart the Mac before restarting XPress.

Thanks JRS and Navpreet. It worked. I feel so relieved. I owe both of you a beer. This is a very cool forum. I'm going to have to see if I can be of help and pay into the future some how. Thanks again.

 

Good deal, glad you're back up and running. I wouldn't call it a frequent occurrence, but deleting the preference file is useful at times, both when you can't launch, or if some settings or behavior simply seem to have gotten out of whack.

The downside is you lose any changes you've made to the default preferences, and style sheets and colors you've added, etc. So if you do take the time to tweak things the way you like, it is a good idea to quit the application and make a backup of the preference file afterwards. Then if you have an issue like this, you can try putting in a copy of that backup rather than going back to the defaults.