My cable internet won’t be installed until Monday afternoon, so I’ve been plodding along with a reluctantly purchased AOL account. (No, it’s not free anymore … I signed up several months ago after I began traveling.)

AOL’s Mac software seems to be insanely buggy and unpolished. I can only start the AOL application half the time, and I can never quit it properly. The next time I start AOL after I’ve force-quit it, it usually gives me a message about not being able to open the file ‘Window Size Database’. Fortunately, I can guess that the file in question is basically a throw-away user preference file, so I merely delete it and move on (which AOL - in their infinite wisdom - opted not to do automatically). Side question: Would AOL’s target audience, the novice internet user, know to do this?

But several times, after searching for and subsequently deleting the Window Size Database, I’ve been given this lovely message:

And I have absolutely no idea what to do with that. (No, it’s not OK.)

It goes away after trying to open the application again a few more times, but I don’t like error messages I don’t understand. And I find that I can usually understand them, so this bugs me in a small sort of way.

Any ideas?

Update: While trying to edit this post with MarsEdit, I recieved a message which read (in part):

Sorry, your entry could not be edited. Something wrong happened.

I’d like to point out several things about the difference between these two seemingly similar error messages. Firstly, Ranchero (makers of MarsEdit and NetNewsWire) is a tiny company consisting mainly of a husband and wife who somehow still manage to pump out impressively cool software. Because of that, they’re allowed to have slightly ambiguous error messages from time to time. Secondly, ‘Something wrong happened’ is rather funny. ‘AOL cannot start’ is not. Take your pick.