Mac OS X 10.5.5 causing Address Book issues

September 16, 2008

Mac OS X 10.5.5 seems to have introduced a quite unfortunate bug in Address Book which can cause Address Book to malfunction, and third party apps such as LaunchBar to crash.
Update: This bug seems to be fixed in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

When your address book contains a smart group whose condition refers to “any group”, Address Book will stop working properly. You will get lots of error messages in the Console:

2008-09-16 09:47:33 Address Book[2689] *** -[NSCFArray insertObject:atIndex:]: attempt to insert nil

and applications that attempt to access the address book data (such as LaunchBar) will crash.

For example, if you have a smart group with the condition Card is not member of any group:

Card is not member of any group

you will get into troubles after upgrading to Mac OS X 10.5.5.

How to avoid this problem

  1. If you haven’t yet upgraded to 10.5.5, delete the corresponding smart group before you upgrade.
  2. If you are already running 10.5.5, do not create any smart group that refers to “any group”.

How to fix this problem

If you’ve already upgraded to 10.5.5 and find yourself suffering from this bug, things are a bit more complicated. You cannot simply delete the affected smart group, since Address Book won’t run properly due to this bug.

Solution 1

Although Address Book refuses to accept user input, it still seems to be possible to interact with Address Book via AppleScript.

Launch the Script Editor application (which is located in /Applications/AppleScript), and enter the following script:

tell application "Address Book"
    delete (first group whose name is "My Smart Group")
end tell

Replace "My Smart Group" with the actual name of the problematic smart group (but keep the surrounding quotes). Now run the script, then quit and restart Address Book. The problematic smart group should be gone, and Address Book should work properly again.

Solution 2

An alternative solution how to delete a problematic smart group from Address Book has been posted at http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=91133.

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