Suddenly 3DConnectionHelper starts crashing…

[Kabe]

Absolutely weird behavior… until a few hours ago my Spacemouse worked just fine under MacOS 26.6.2 (25G83) using Plasticity & Blender.

Then I tried to edit preferences for a new program, and suddenly started to act weirdly, until I realized that 3DConnectionHelper crashed.

And since then, 3DconnexionHelper version 1.4.4 crashes almost immediately after launch (within about one second). The crash was caused by an uncaught application exception (SIGABRT) while the helper was loading its user interface. It appears to fail while processing a path or text value through NSString.containsString, leading to an exception in NSPathStore2.
Crash logs are attached below.

I tried to reinstall, to no avail. My suspicion is a corrupted preference file somewhere, as the crash points to an issue with string handling, and the same driver version worked just fine before.

Any tips where to finde those and do a real clean reinstall?

Thanks

Klaus

[AmroSalih]

You may want to get in touch with our Technical Support Team. Please visit https://3dconnexion.com/support/.

[Kabe]

I did get in touch with the support, and got a very helpful response that led o a successful solution.

The issue were indeed corrupted preference files, those are stored in ~/Library/Preferences, and some of them contained entries with empty values for both application and bundleid.

Uninstalling, removing the preferences in ~/Library/Preferences, and reinstalling fixed the issue.

So there were actually two bugs that could be fixed in a perfect world:

• under no circumstances should the preference dialog write these entries
• the driver should handle corrupted data more gracefully than by throwing an unhandled exception aka crashing

Bonus: The uninstaller should at least offer to delete the preferences so there is really a clean slate for reinstalling

Anyway, I'm fine, and hope this thread might help someone in the future.

Klaus