Activity Monitor in Snow Leopard

If you’re anything like me, then you like to keep your computer nice and neat and organised; this includes sorting all of my applications into categories so that they don’t clutter the place up in one big list.

In Mac OS X 10.6 (aka Snow Leopard), this presents a bit of a problem as Activity Monitor can no long be moved as the path to activitymonitord is now hard coded for some reason. If you do move it, then Activity Monitor appears to start and then just hangs.

If you fire up the Console application to take a look at the syslog, then you’ll see messages along the lines of:

18/03/2010 22:20:34 com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.ActivityMonitor[1716]) posix_spawn(“/Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app/Contents/MacOS/activitymonitord”, …): No such file or directory
18/03/2010 22:20:34 com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.ActivityMonitor[1716]) Exited with exit code: 1
18/03/2010 22:20:34 com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.ActivityMonitor) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds

There is a similar problem with the System Preferences application if you are trying to install custom preference panes such as Growl where the install window will hang with similar looking console messages:

18/03/2010 22:50:46 com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.systempreferences.install) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds
18/03/2010 22:50:56 com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.systempreferences.install[2390]) posix_spawn(“/Applications/System Preferences.app/Contents/Resources/installAssistant”, …): No such file or directory
18/03/2010 22:50:56 com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.systempreferences.install[2390]) Exited with exit code: 1

This is only a problem when installing new preference panes, and the System Preferences will work fine normally when moved.

Hopefully this will save someone the headache of trying to diagnose this. I was on the verge of doing a re-install, having only just installed OS X in the first place and started moving everything to be how I like it!