Borked Find Window in OS X

Question

I've been having this happen to me on a daily basis with the Find & Replace window on OS X:

No text can be typed into the red regions, so all find & replace functionality is gone when this occurs. If you hover over the red regions, you can see the following error message:

An unknown box name ($Aborted) was sent as the BoxForm for the expression. Check the format rules for the expression.

The only solution to this, as far as I can tell, is to restart the kernel, which is fairly annoying. I recall that in previous versions of Mathematica (prior to 7), the Find & Replace window wasn't tied to the kernel at all, and this sort of thing would never occur. I think this is probably just a bug, but perhaps there is something I am doing in my code, perhaps setting a reserved variable that this window depends on, that is leading to the repeated recurrence of the problem.

Just wanted to see if anyone here has had experience with this issue (perhaps it's not just OS X specific), and if they had any tips on how to avoid it, or perhaps some remedies that don't involve a full kernel restart.

Edit: Here's a bit of code I used to stress-test a potential cause of this issue:

For[i = 1, i <= 100, i++,
    pal = CreatePalette[Dynamic@ProgressIndicator[progress]];
    progress = 0; cnt = 0;
    Do[cnt = cnt + 1; progress = cnt/100000, {j, 100000}];
    NotebookClose[pal];
]

Answer 1

From Troubleshooting on Mac OS X:

Front End Preferences

Front end preferences, such as the locations of recently opened and saved files, are stored in a front end initialization file called init.m. This file is located in the directory ~/Library/Mathematica/FrontEnd. If you need to reset the front end preferences to their default values, hold down Shift+Option during startup. This will cause the initialization file to be rebuilt automatically.

Caches

Information about your Mathematica system layout, such as the locations of text resource files and help files, is stored in caches. These caches are located in the directory ~/Library/Mathematica/FrontEnd/7.0/Caches.

A corrupted cache may cause the front end to produce an error or quit immediately on startup. The most convenient way to restore the caches to their default values is to hold down Shift+Option during startup. This will cause the Mathematica caches and the initialization file to be rebuilt automatically.

If you want to rebuild your caches but retain your preferences, hold down Shift during startup. This will delete and rebuild the cache without rebuilding your front end initialization file.

Please try clearing cache, and if necessary preferences, and see if the problem persists. In my experience most emergent Mathematica idiosyncrasies are tied to cache or preferences.