Frozen Clock on Menu Bar

Did you also try to restart the Finder? Sounds like the Finder hanged. What were you doing at this moment?

Weird,

That same thing just happened to me today. I waited it out awhile and eventually it went away. I thought it was because I enabled the screen spanning hack on my iBook for the first time after the reformat but I guess it's more common than that? Have you installed this hack? Also, usually I have the "display" menu icon not showing. This only happened when it was up there. Do you have the monitor icon in your bar?

Does it stop being frozen if you unplug your iPod?
For a time, I was having a problem like that, but only when my iPod was connected.

Lee Tom

I too have experienced this. On both my 15 inch PB 1.25, and my new iMac g5. I do, too, believe it's the OS. I have had an iPod plugged into both, but I"m not sure if the hangs coresponded with them being plugged in. Next time it happens, I'll have to see.

<AOL>

I got this running 10.3.5 on a G4 /1.25 dual but it SEEMS to be more after a screen saver kick in and relogin (login to existing desktop). No iPod connected. Did have Java programs running though.

Glad it happened to some one else (!) for I thought I was going mad.

its happened to me before
(i waited it out and it went away... after like an hour or some absurdly long time)

do the other people that have had it have their computer set to auto-update the time from the internet? could it have to do with that?

Restarting the Finder wouldn't help anyway. Any MenuExtras (all the stuff in the menu bar supplied by Apple, and very very few third party apps) are run under "SystemUI Server". Just kill that in activity monitor or Terminal and it will restart itself.

I update my time from euro.apple.* but certainly I have only noticed this after a "screen saver" event.

This is a very wide spread problem and if you are experiencing the same issue that many of us have had it's related to iTunes. Next time you login check the clock it should be working fine. Now start iTunes and put your cursor over the clock you will see the spinning cursor start and not go away while the cursor is over the clock. Also iTunes has long load times. I have been fighting this for several weeks. I've tried removing all menu bar items deleting all prefs and application support files. Clearing all caches manually and with automatic programs. Nothing would fix it. The way I fixed it today was to reinstall OSX. It doesn't take very long just be sure not to copy over all your old prefs. That part is kind of a pain but I have to say that even with all the work I put into maintaining my system running permissions, prebinding, clearing caches, deleting old prefs, etc. for some reasons the system always seems to be working better on a fresh reinstall especially after several system updates.

after I read this thread, it almost happened to me, just that a second is too long ... Panic!

Macbandit.. I cannot reproduce that with my Itunes (I can select the menu and have no spinning ball).

Yes it fixes it self if you reinstall os x

spencecb said:

Yes, it is surely a problem with the connection of the iPod. As soon as I took my iPod off of its dock, the clock fixed itself. Hopefully Apple will have this fixed in the next update to iTunes/iPod...wherever the problem lies.

Click to expand...

Reinstalling will fix it and yes I have 10.3.5 and an iPod. I was just doing some reading about the issue and some people have cured it by unchecking the spin hard drive down when possible box in the energy prefpane. Apparently some hard drives are not compatible with Apples power saving mode.

There has been some on going discussion over at MacInTouch.com about this issue. Follow the link below and read the second reader response on Aug. 16, 2004. Also if you read through that page there's a couple other people with the issue.

http://www.macintouch.com/itunes22.html

MacBandit said:

Reinstalling will fix it and yes I have 10.3.5 and an iPod.

Click to expand...

I have found that reinstalling may correct the issue for awhile, but that it always comes back. I have formatted and reinitialized my iPod many many times, and reinstalled OS X more than a few times. In my case, the problem continues to crop up every month or two.

apple_iBoy said:

I have found that reinstalling may correct the issue for awhile, but that it always comes back. I have formatted and reinitialized my iPod many many times, and reinstalled OS X more than a few times. In my case, the problem continues to crop up every month or two.

Click to expand...

Hmm, I had the problem about a year ago with Jaguar and it didn't come back until now.

Clock frozen?

I just had this issue and I fixed it. Look at your activity monitor. You might see that there is a system ui file clogging up the works. I forced quit it and the clock worked again. It is not just the clock. The whole right side menu items would not work. I had to create a new account. That did the trick. The problem was not present on the new account.

potterfast said:

I just had this issue and I fixed it. Look at your activity monitor. You might see that there is a system ui file clogging up the works. I forced quit it and the clock worked again. It is not just the clock. The whole right side menu items would not work. I had to create a new account. That did the trick. The problem was not present on the new account.

Click to expand...

I wasn't able to find the process clogging up my system. There wasn't any high cpu load processes taking place with my situation. In fact when I had the problem and was diagnosing it I checked my cpu load using TOP and I was at less then one percent.

Since creating a new user fixed the problem I still suspect it's a cache or pref file. The problem is finding it since I went through and deleted every cache and pref file I could find on my system and the problem still persisted.

Well I was recreating my wife's user folder after reinstalling the system yesterday and when I started iTunes it hung the clock and fast user switching menu items. So I started diagnostics again and thanks to everyone that mentioned the iPod I have cured my machine for the time being.

I initially went back to my user and checked iTunes there. It locked things up there so I figured it was a system level problem not related to the user specifically. I then did a search in the system folder and the system level library folder for all changed files this afternoon. Knowing that it was fine earlier today. I then deleted all cache and pref files created this afternoon that I found in those folders. I then logged out and back in which I know fixes the problem and tried the problem. No go it still had issues. So then I started thinking about this thread and I remember the iPod association. So I unplugged my iPod and tried again. iTunes would then start up fine and the menu bar was not locked up. So I did a system wide search for anything with iPod in the name. I then deleted all the pref and cache files that that search turned up. After that everything has been working correctly.

I hope this helps.