Yesterday, discovered on one of my Tiger laptop, the search box of the System Preferences behaved funny.
Usually, when you type something in the search box of the System Preferences window, the spotlight will highlight the relevant items, so one can easily open the preference with arrow keys and enter key.
However, in my case, I typed something, the whole window darkened, but nothing was highlighted. Very strange. I created a new user, logged on, no such problem, must be my account settings. Logically, I went to the ~/Library folder to have a look.
The first thing I noticed was the whole ~/Library folder is rather big, more than 500 MB. The Caches occupied the lion’s share, more than 400 MB. Searched the internet, many suggested that it can be safely removed. I made a copy, trashed the ~/Library/Caches folder.
Tested, the System Preferences search box is back to normal.
