miekd / software

For the last couple of months, my Mac would get in this peculiar situation where the fans would start screaming bloody murder and the CPU usage of a process called ReportCrash would be stable at a lovely 100% CPU Usage.

Together with one of my colleagues, and the trusty Console.app, we were able to track it down to Image Capture Extension.app, and the culprit that was zealously calling this application even though it crashed every single time it launched.

This process seemed to be called by Safari and would crash every single time with the following error:

*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: '-[__NSCFString replaceOccurrencesOfString:withString:options:range:]: nil argument'

It seems that in my case, the Coda Notes extension, in combination with Safari 6 was the culprit. This tried to fire up the Image Capture Extension.app process, which would bail out but keep on retrying and creating crash reports.

Solution: Remove Coda Notes from Safari 6.

Now, it might not be Coda Notes for everybody, so if that doesn’t help you out, check out Console.app and look what repeating errors occur. That way you can diagnose what application is causing this ruckus and disable it.

When looking to fix this problem, I found a solution by Brandon Seibel. But this one was indeed, as he called it, a sledgehammery fix (and broke my iOS Simulator). The biggest take-away is: whenever your Mac is acting up and you can’t seem to fix it, have a good look at Console.app.