I don’t often complain about my Macs, since I so infrequently have issues with them, but this weekend was definitely an exception.

I’ve been having some issues with iChat. Something, perhaps my network keeps disconnecting, which would not be that big a deal except for some reason my iChat doesn’t seem to realize I’m offline and leaves me looking like I’m logged in, when I’m not. I was at a loss as to why this was happening, so I thought perhaps I’d do a rebuild and see if maybe that would help. I chose to do an Archive and Install since that should only replace my /Library and /System folders, leaving my User and Application files intact. I also did not want to affect my Boot Camp install and I figured that would be the outcome. How wrong I was.

I did the Archive and Install and when I was reinstalling my third party plug ins etc, I went to set my iChat preferences, I notice that iChat was reporting that my iSight was in use by another application, it of course was not. At a loss for what happened, and after some discussion with Pinoyboy, we decided that a rebuild with a fresh install of OS X would be best. So I set about backing up my data, erasing my partition and reinstalling the OS. Twenty-five minutes later, I was ready to start installing my Apps (hey I had to get a pro Mac statement in somewhere!). Before I did that tho, I decided to check iChat… and lo and behold… the same thing. The iSight was in use. WTF!!! I had no clue at this point what the issue could be!

Frustrated, I turned my attention to the most off the wall ideas to solve the problem. I am not sure how I decided that perhaps my Boot Camp partition was the culprit. It made no sense whatsoever, and I couldn’t for the life of me understand what could be tied to the Boot Camp install but I ran the Boot Camp Assistant and restored the partition to a single partition. After a reboot. Damned if the iSight didn’t work perfect! I have no clue at all how it all tied together, but I’m just glad it’s fixed.