This on-line documentation is intended to provide a brief overview of Conflict Catcher’s Conflict Test features.  You should read the Conflict Catcher User's Guide for complete information about the Conflict Test.

Click on the ‘Conflict Test...’ button and Conflict Catcher will display the ‘Conflict Test’ dialog...

Before you actually start the testing process, you can specify testing options that can reduce the time needed to isolate the conflicting startup file(s).  These include...

• Intuition - If you have an idea about which startup files may be responsible for your system problem, you can have Conflict Catcher test the ones that you suspect before starting a general test.  If your intuition is right, this ‘pre-testing’ can find the culprit more quickly since you’ll only be testing a small subset of your startup files.  However, if your intuition is wrong, Conflict Catcher will flow right into the general conflict test, and your overall testing time will be a little longer.

• Scan For Damaged Startup Files First - When this option is checked, Conflict Catcher will verify that the structure (information that describes a startup file to the system software) of all enabled startup files is correct.  Corrupted startup files often have ‘structural damage’ (incorrect or missing descriptive information) that Conflict Catcher can detect, helping to quickly find the likely culprit in your conflict.

Once you’ve selected the options that you want to use for this test, click ‘Start Conflict Test’, and after scanning for corrupted startup files, Conflict Catcher will prompt you for a description of the problem that you’re experiencing.

The first thing that you should do after you’ve completed your conflict description is to look at the ‘instruction window’ to find out what the next step in the test will be.  The isolation of the culprits begins by instructing you to click on any startup files that must remain on.

To continue with the test, Conflict Catcher tells you to Click OK, determine if the problem exists and restart your computer.  When you click the ‘OK’ button, your computer will continue starting up.  Next you’ll need to check to see if the problem is still present.  Once you’re sure that it’s still there or that it’s gone, restart your machine (preferably using the Finder’s Special/Restart menu option).

After you’ve restarted, Conflict Catcher will come up and ask ‘Did the problem go away?’  If the problem disappeared, click ‘Problem Gone’.  If the problem still showed up, click ‘Problem Exists’.  Continue through the process until Conflict Catcher identifies the culprit.

When Conflict Catcher has narrowed the group of suspects down to a single startup file, it will report that ‘The file ‘[name of culprit]’ has been identified as part of the problem’.

At this point you have the option of continuing the Conflict Test to make sure that this culprit is the only one responsible for your problem, or stopping the test.