I had a problem the other day where my Mac only got as far as displaying the Spotlight icon before it just froze displaying the spinning colour wheel of doom.

My guess was that it was a font issue as I had recently (and stupidly) dragged some fonts from a local server into a Library in Font Book and my guess was that my Mac was trying to find those fonts but couldn’t as it they were on the server.

After searching around (fortunately I had another Mac handy) I found that if you only get as far as the Spotlight icon at startup it is probably because of a corrupt font cache or possible a corrupt Spotlight playlist.

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Netscape 6.x and 7.x (Windows, Mac):

1. From the Edit drop-down menu at the top of the browser, select Preferences.
2. A thread-hierarchy appears on the left of the Preferences dialog box. Click on the arrow to the left of Advanced.
3. Under the expanded Advanced portion of the hierarchy is Cache. Click the word Cache. This will change the right side of the Preferences dialog box.
4. Click the Clear Memory Cache button on the right of the Preferences dialog box.
5. Click the Clear Disk Cache button on the right of the Preferences dialog box.
6. Click OK to leave Preferences.
7. Click the Reload button at the top of your browser. (This button is to the right of the Forward button.)

Netscape 4.x (Windows):

1. Select ‘Edit > Preferences’ from the main menu.
2. Select ‘Advanced > Cache’ from the panel on the left.
3. Click the Clear Memory Cache button on the right of the Preferences dialog box.
4. A dialog box will appear that says, ‘This will remove all the files currently in your memory cache. Continue?’ Click the OK button.
5. Click the Clear Disk Cache button on the right of the Preferences dialog box.
6. A dialog box will appear that says, ‘This will remove all the files in your disk cache. Continue?’ Click the OK button.
7. Click OK until you leave Preferences.
8. Click the Reload button at the top of your browser. (This button is to the right of the Forward button.)

Tip: Navigator 3.x and Communicator 4.x users: If you’re often having to reload frequently updated pages, you may want to take this chance to set ‘Verify Documents’ option to ‘Every Time.’ This will make the browser retreive the latest copy of a web page even if it’s in the cache.

Netscape 4.x (Mac):

1. From the Edit drop-down menu at the top of the browser, select Preferences.
2. A thread-hierarchy appears on the left of the Preferences dialog box. Click to the left of the word Advanced to expand it.
3. The first item under the expanded Advanced portion is Cache. Click the word Cache. This will change the right of the Preferences dialog box.
4. Click the Clear Disk Cache button on the right of the Preferences dialog box.
5. A dialog box will appear that says, ‘This will remove all the files in your disk cache. Continue?’ Click the OK button.
6. Click OK until you leave Preferences.
7. Click the Reload button at the top of your browser. (This button is to the right of the Forward button.)

Netscape Navigator 3.x:

1. Select ‘Options > Network Preferences’ from the main menu.
2. Change to the ‘Cache’ tab.
3. Click on ‘Clear Memory Cache Now’ and ‘Clear Disk Cache Now’ buttons to clear memory and disk cache.

Tip: Although it’s not required by all browsers, it is a good idea to restart your browser after clearing the cache.