No, I don’t have a vault.

Thanks, guys, I’lll give a shot some time.

My external drives all say “ignore ownership” as being checked on the “get info” window - I assume this doesn’t mean it doesn’t use ownership permissions, just that it ignores them so anyone can access them while on the external? It will be ok to leave this setting, generate aperture library’s on them and copy them over to internal drives?

Who knows if this import will fix my issue, but if it doesn’t then it will be more likely that a corrupt image is causing it. I’ll cross that road when I get to it!

Well, just to update:

I finally did the BIG import.

Here’s what I did:

1) Create a new Aperture Library on an external drive.
2) Switch to this library, and selected import, pointing to my internal drive (this took 7+ hours over night for my 300GB library).
3) Checked the integrity of the new imported lirbary - files seemed fine, and all metadata I checked seemed to be intact. However, all the folder structure had become alphabetical, and some projects from within a folder were juggled around - I discovered one project appeared twice, even though only one set of photos existed -is this the possible library corruption? I deleted it and reimported.
4) As a precautionary measure, I copied my original library to the external drive as a back up (4+ hours), and deleted it from the internal.
5) Copied over the newly imported from the external into place on my internal.
6) Just to be safe, I repaired permissions (1 hour), repaired database (1 hour?), and rebuilt database (1 hour) fromt eh first aid menu - I wanted to make sure everything on my new library is good. I even regenerated all previews (13 hours).

Now my new library is back in order. I THINK everything is better. My issue if iPad syncing is mitigated, but not entirely removed.

If you recall, my issue was that only certain events caused the ApertureDataTimeStamp from refreshing, thus causing the ApertureData.xml file from failing to update (and on occasion corrupting to be an empty file), which led to incorrect syncing of albums to any iDevice pointing at my Aperture Library.

This is sort of gone away. When I move projects around in my Aperture Library, Aperture will now spend half a minute or so chugging away, but eventually update the XML. I tried setting Aperture to only do this on exit, but it crashed, so I set it back to always.

I’m convinced the bug is related to something in my Library that causes Aperture to ‘hang’ when processing a library change, possibly when previews are being generated. I recall before Aperture 3.1 (when the bug started happening), and there was no “TimeStamp” file to trigger changes (that’s an iLife 11 implementation), that upon closing Aperture I ALWAYS had a small progress bar telling me previews were updating, but that hardly happens now, and maybe that’s the issue - something hangs, and Aperture quits too quickly before it gets resolved?

I dunno, really, but only time will tell if importing new images, and adjusting images will now once again cause the ApertureData.xml to update as it’s supposed to, so here’s hoping!

Thanks for your help, Joseph.

edit: It may not have fixed everything perfectly, but I think at the very least, there’s a much easier workaround now to force my .xml to update - ie. move some projects around, and then wait 30 seconds. Much better than my previous one of rebuilding my entire library everytime!