from the wtf dept.

[adularia]

Buh. After repairing disk permissions and trashing my Illustrator preferences again, things seem to be returning to normal. All of a sudden, copy/pasting between Illustrator and Photoshop stopped working in the usual way, causing Illustrator to crash and Photoshop to bitch about it while booting (it is documented as a problem with clipboard data in PDF format. Switching to AICB format (whatever the heck that is - it supports raster OR Adobe path information, but not both) clears it up. AND the heisenbug concerning Illustrator's refusal to group objects by keyboard or mouse shortcut also seems to have been fixed.

"When in doubt, trash the prefs" appears to be the battle cry for Mac software problems, in much the same way as "When in doubt, reformat the hard drive" is the all-purpose Windows fix :P