HELP!!! Inactive tracks, but not?
 

I've been having ongoing problems already with playback because my computer is too slow but I've no other options to work with.
When I opened my first session for the day it gave me the old "CPU can't keep up" error. Same with all the sessions I tried.
Didn't know what to do so I figured I'd trash prefs for a start. Did the thing, restarted the computer, and when I opened up the session again all the tracks were grayed out, as if they'd all been disabled. So I right clicked thinking I'm going to activate them but that option wasn't there!
Instead of saying "Make selected tracks active" like I was expecting it says "Make selected tracks inactive". Same with all my other sessions.
WTF?!?!
Does this have something to do with trashing the prefs?
I will mention that when I started the computer up there were updates to install and I went ahead and did that. I'm wondering if that was somehow a bad move.
This sucks because I was supposed to finish this project today and now I'm hosed.
I'm going to try restarting again for lack of any other options but I'm not holding my breath.

Macbook Pro 17
2.4 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
SSD
Pro Tools 12

Re: HELP!!! Inactive tracks, but not?
 

Sounds like your playback engine has changed. That would/could get trashed with preferences.

The tracks aren't inactive, they jut don't have valid outputs any more. Change your playback engine to what it was and they will be valid again.

Re: HELP!!! Inactive tracks, but not?
 

Or maybe the voices are turned off? On your mixer page, look at the bottom of your channel strip on make sure there is a box on each channel saying "dyn" (or has a voice number) rather than "off".

Re: HELP!!! Inactive tracks, but not?
 

Was there any real reason you installed the updates? Did you even look to see what those updates were before you installed them? Were these OSX updates? Just because you may get a notification of updates doesn't mean they have to be installed. Never do any updates in the middle of a project. This is a good reason for having clone backups of your system so that when things go toes up you can recover.

What exact OSX are you running? I think your profile says OSX 10.9.5 and if so I seem to remember a security update that hosed my computer back when I ran that system. Thankfully I had a clone to go back to.

It's possible the updates hosed a plugin or two. Startup PT in safe mode by holding down the shift key when opening the session. See if everything runs okay.

What exact error message pops up on the screen? Is it an aae error?