Fixing the Apple Remote Desktop client when it crashes repeatedly

On a few of my servers, I’d recently begun running into a problem where the ARDAgent process (which is the process for the Apple Remote Desktop client) was crashing repeatedly. It would launch, crash, relaunch, crash, relaunch, crash, relaunch, etc. every few minutes. The common factor seemed to be that it was happening on my 10.4.x Macs (I didn’t see the problem on 10.5.x or 10.6.x Macs) and would persist across reboots, reinstalls and everything else I could think of.

I’d seen a number of folks with the same problem, but I didn’t find a solution until I ran across this Apple Support Discussions thread.

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I have run into a similar problem a couple of times but today was the first time I was actually able to resolve it!

The fix I used is to remove the /Library/Application Support/Apple/Remote Desktop/Client directory and restart the client. For whatever reason the tasks.plist in the Tasks folder found inside the Client directory above seemed to be corrupt; removing it seemed to do the trick.

Restarting the Agent from the command line: /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -restart -agent

Hope this helps!

Jonathan

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I tried it out on my own servers, and it looks like it has resolved the problem! Here’s what I did:

1. Logged in with an admin account.
2. Opened Terminal.
3. Ran the following command to stop the Apple Remote Desktop client:

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -agent -stop

4. Ran the following command to remove the /Library/Application Support/Apple/Remote Desktop/Client directory:

sudo rm -rf /Library/Application\ Support/Apple/Remote\ Desktop/Client

5. Ran the following command to restart the Apple Remote Desktop client:

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -agent -restart