How a Strange Mac Bug Took Up a Ridiculous Amount of My Time

Recently, I ended up spending an inordinate amount of time chasing down a bizarre Mac bug. It seems to have resolved, but the cause still eludes me (and Apple). It started with a Lightroom crash, and ended up leading to a complete puzzle that plagued both my Mac Studio and my MacBook Pro. It involved several calls to Apple and even baffled them. This might not sound like a riveting read, but it’s actually a curious tale and I learned a few things along the way. More importantly though, if you come across something similar it might help you resolve it.

So here we go…

It started with a crash

While some people like to complain about Adobe apps and their stability, the truth is, I never really get many crashes. Lightroom almost never crashes, and even After Effects (a crash happy application if there was ever one) is relatively stable these days. So I was quite surprised when in the middle of working with Lightroom the application hung and presented me with a strange dialog box I had never seen before. I didn’t get to screenshot it and I partially ignored it but it was something to do with syncing or core sync or something.

I had been having a few issues with the creative cloud app and had recently reinstalled it, so I figured that was the culprit…