Wireless connectivity (AirPort) issues under Mac OS X 10.4.8? Delete specific .plist files

As part of our Mac OS X 10.4.8 Special Report, we noted that some users experience issues with wireless connectivity (generally with AirPort-equipped Macs) after applying the update. This is relatively common occurrence with incremental Mac OS X updates, as most make at least minor modifications to both networking architecture and/or AirPort-related files.

Specific to Mac OS X 10.4.8, users experienced inability to automatically reconnect to wireless networks when starting up or waking from sleep, poor throughput, or an inability to connect.

Our Special Report offered a number of potential workarounds for these problems, including deletion and re-establishment of all preferred wireless networks, removal of third-party wireless monitoring utilities and more. Most of these fixes were culled from our AirPort troubleshooting tutorial.

Now some readers are reporting success with a fix not mentioned in our initial report.

Try deleting the following files from the ~/Library/Preferences/ directory (this is the Library directory within your User folder):

• com.apple.internetconfig.plist
• com.apple.internetconfigpriv.plist
• com.apple.internetconnect.plist

In addition, delete any other files that have are named as such: com.apple.internetconfig[...]

MacFixIt reader Abrey Myers had success with this fix, and writes:

"As soon as I did that and rebooted, all wireless problems vanished and connectivity was stable and swift as before. [...] Apple's tech note on this issue didn't make sense: resetting the router didn't change the behavior of any Macs that didn't update to Mac OS X 10.4.8, which were working fine before the affected machines were updated, and continued to work; nor were Windows machines affected. [...] Basically (for me) the Mac OS X 10.4.8 update corrupted some or all of these files."

Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.

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