MacOS – Multiple finder preference plists in mavericks

It can be caused by a great number of things, but I believe the most common cause is where the file is being written to, and the application terminates before it's finished writing the file. This could be caused by system overheads being too great for a successful write at the time.

Hardware errors with the hard disk, or memory could also cause data errors, but I would imagine these would be the least of your problems by this time.

I actually fixed my problem by deleting and re-creating my user account. I chose to keep the home folder in place and used it as an existing folder when I created the replacement account.

While I was troubleshooting everything I was monitoring the logs and saw no error specific error messages. The only thing that looked suspicious was a message about CalendarAgent returning status 4. I wasn't able to find a reference for that status message.

If I understand it correctly, the problem would had to have been in the /var/db/ directory in order to get fixed by an account deletion.