OS X Leopard Screen Saver Preference Pane Hangs

I got a unibody MacBook Pro 17″ recently.  I had some issues with that one and I had it replaced with a new one. (There is a lot more to this story and you can read about it on my personal blog.)

I get the replacement unibody MacBook and I do a restore from Time Machine.  I had previously installed all my apps from scratch on the exact same Mac before it died. (again see other post)  I log in for the first time and I do all my updates.  Everything works great!  Except for one thing:

Everytime I open my Screen Saver Preference pane…  I get the Beach Ball and my System Preferences hangs and I must force quit!

I google and google…  Finally I found a fix at the Apple Support Discussions:  Screen Saver Preference Pane Lockup thanks swmbuk!

Let me lay out the Symptoms and summarize the fix:

Symptoms I noticed:

1. Opening System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver > Screen Saver caused my System Preferences to crash or beach ball for a good while then crash
2. I noticed that in my system.log (Console > system.log) there was an entry: “Call to deprecated method ILApertureMediaManager::init. Please update your code to use ILApertureMediaManager::sharedManager:“
3. When I could navigate in the Screen Saver preference pane and select “iTunes Artwork” it would claim that I had none.
4. Attempting to install another screen saver would cause the system to hang.
5. Creating a new admin account and then log in as that account would produce the same results.

The fix summarized: (kudos again to swmbuk)

1. I got my install dvd’s that came with my MacBook and inserted the second one marked “Applications Install Disk”
2. Went to Finder and deleted the folder: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/iLifeMediaBrowser.framework
3. Dowloaded and Installed Pacifist from: http://www.charlessoft.com/
4. Executed the Pacifist application
5. With the “Open Package…” dialog in Pacifist, I opened “Installed Bundled Applications” from the disk. (it took a while to extract the packages)
6. I expanded the “Contents of  InstallBundledSoftware.mpkg”
7. Selected “Contents of iLifeMediaBrowser_v2.pkg” and clicked install.
8. I had to enter my admin password and some other dialog boxes.
9. I ran software update and installed “iLife Support 9.0.3″

VOILA! All symptoms resolved

I post this because it took quite a while for me to find a fix that actually worked.  There also seems to be several people experiencing a similar issue.  I hope this post helps some of you.