MacOS – iCloud PreferencesPane crashes after upgrade to Yosemite

crashicloudmacossystem-prefs

I just upgraded to Mac OS X Yosemite 10.10.

During the final step of the install, my network connection dropped while trying to set up the iCloud settings. As it says that I can skip this step and configure it later, I did.

Now, I am trying to set up iCloud and upgrade to iCloud Drive.

When I click on the iCloud icon in System Preferences, the App freezes (beach balling) and I am forced to force quit it.

In the Force Quit window, I see System Preferences (not responding) and right below it I see com.apple.preferences.icloud.remoteservice (not responding). If I Force Quit System Preferences, naturally, the whole app quits. If I force quit com.apple.preferences.icloud.remoteservice then I get a notice in the System Preferences app that says Preferences Error: Could not load iCloud preference pane.

In Activity Monitor, I can also see that both System Preferences and com.apple.preferences.icloud.remoteservice are not responding.

In console, I see the following crash report:

20/10/2014 01:46:04.026 System Preferences[4901]: ### com.apple.preferences.icloud instantiatePrefPaneObject exception:service com.apple.preferences.icloud.remoteservice failed to init an instance of iCloudRemoteViewService on behalf of <NSRemoteView: 0x7fb885309930> due to proxy-communications-error: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=4099 "Couldn’t communicate with a helper application." (The connection from pid 0 was invalidated from this process.) UserInfo=0x618000467100 {NSDebugDescription=The connection from pid 0 was invalidated from this process.}

I am guessing something got corrupted when I skipped the iCloud setup during the last steps of the install process, and perhaps I need to reset/delete the iCloud preferences and let the system regenerate them.

How can I resolve this issue?

Best Answer

iCloud preferences seem to be spread across a few different plist files. The main one (funnily enough) seems to be called /Users/YOURUSERNAME/Library/Preferences/MobileMeAccounts.plist. That's the one that stores your account details (ID, UUID, DSID and AlternateDSID) and information about the services you have enabled or disabled.

You could try closing System Preferences entirely, renaming that file temporarily, restarting your Mac and then seeing if System Preferences can then open its iCloud pane.