Ok, so I was messing around with parental controls, and I created a new admin account, made my main account a standard account and enabled parental controls. I messed around with website blocking, application blocking, and time limiting. I found the application blocking to be quite dodgy, including applications (esp. widgets) becoming blocked for no reason, and applications saying they were blocked and asking for the admin password when they were supposedly unblocked.

I then disabled parental controls, enabled admin privileges, rebooted, then deleted the other admin account. When I went to my dashboard all my widgets were not there (they were still installed - in the dock thing at the bottom). I tried dragging out some of the apple widgets like calculator and flight tracker, and they came out fine. However if I try to drag out a 3rd party widget, as soon as you drop it it exits the dashboard. This happens for most 3rd party widgets, however not all of them are affected. It seems to be random the ones that work (eg. the DEVONsearch widget works but the DEVONjot widget does not).

I believe that this problem is happening because of the parental controls application blocking bugs outlined above. I so far have tried re-enabling parental controls and inputting my password for every widget (when parental controls are on it quits and displays a "application blocked, enter admin password to unblock" dialogue - This is the same behaviour as when parental controls are off except it displays the dialogue), and repairing disk permissions. Needless to say that I have also restarted both the dock (killall Dock) and the whole machine. When I repaired the permissions it found a lot of user permission errors on some Widget bundles, however it did not fix the problem.

The problem happened whilst I was using 10.5.2, however I have since upgraded to 10.5.3.

If anyone has any insight that may help fix this issue I would be very thankful.

Try looking for a preference file, such as "com.apple.parentalcontrols". I'm not sure if this is the way the controls are stored.

If this fails, the best thing to do is to create a new account, and copy or move your documents (music, txt, images...) across to the new account, and then slowly (2 to 5 files at a time) move library preferences across.

And if you're going to try parental controls, set them on another account, not your everyday one

I tried this, but to no avail

I might just live without my Dashboard, that sounds painfully annoying...

Something tells me I might not mess with parental controls again


UPDATE: Apple has flagged this bug as known and hopefully it will be fixed in 10.5.5