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CodeBreaker

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Nov 5, 2010
494
1
Sea of Tranquility
Since 10.7.2, Lion is not shutting down. Hangs with the white background and spinning wheel. There's nothing logged in console. I have tried repairing permissions and verifying the disk and also a PRAM reset. However, I can shut it down using "shutdown" in terminal.
 

Hitachi-Chan

macrumors newbie
Nov 5, 2010
26
0
Do you have any applications open when you shutdown? And do you have the "Reopen Windows" box checked?
 

Weaselboy

Moderator
Staff member
Jan 23, 2005
34,137
15,600
California
Try restarting in safe mode. That deletes kext caches and checks the drive for errors and is often helpful. Just reboot to safe mode then restart again in normal mode.
 
Last edited:

jem5519

macrumors newbie
Nov 30, 2011
3
0
Mine seems to be tied to MS Office 2011

I upgraded from 10.6 and resetting the pram did help with boot time. The "ferrous wheel of death" seems to be tied to MS Office 2011. If I don't launch any office stuff the machine seems to shut down fine. If I do fire up office I have to shut down with the relaunch flag unset and then I have to use the power button to force it to shut down. If the relaunch flag is checked during the shutdown the machine will have the same problem next time even if I don't touch MS office during the next session. - Jim
 

yeah

macrumors 6502a
Jul 12, 2011
978
292
Try to repair disk permissions.
Or this trick (hidden really): Instead of hitting repair permissions, hit verify disk. This will make sure your disk is in tip-top shape!
 

jem5519

macrumors newbie
Nov 30, 2011
3
0
That did it!

Thanks Eric!

Did the repair function and that was all it took :) boots up fast and shuts down fast.
 

jem5519

macrumors newbie
Nov 30, 2011
3
0
Update

I was premature in announcing that the issue was fixed. I was able to make the problem go away by first exporting all the office data then doing a clean install of Lion; apply all the lion updates; then a fresh install of office 2011 form the latest trial download (trial can be activated with your key); then an import of the office data. Has been working fine for 3 days now ... :rolleyes:
 

r0k

macrumors 68040
Mar 3, 2008
3,611
75
Detroit
I installed Office 2011 for my wife so she could open documents sent by MS-heads at my daughter's school. They would send files that were too obfuscated to be opened by iWork or LibreOffice. We got it for ten bucks through my employer's "home use" program and I felt like it was ten bucks too much.

When I upgraded her to Lion, her HDD got wiped along with the activation and (I thought) the install file for office. She hasn't asked for it back and I'm glad she hasn't. Meanwhile, the other day I was cleaning up old DVDs and found to my horror an Office 2011 DVD. Darn. I must have ordered the physical media. This means if she asks me I have no excuse not to put it back. Darn. :eek:

While Office was on her machine, the following occurred:
  • File associations got pointed first to Office 2011 and later (after reinstalling OS X) Office 2004 trial despite the fact both iWork and Libre Office were present. :rolleyes:
  • The beachball was her constant companion and she honestly thought her Intel Mini was slower than the G4 Mini in the basement. :mad:
  • Fonts went missing that required us to reinstall LibreOffice. :mad:
  • There were 2 or 3 icons worth of MS "cruft" sitting on her menu bar sapping system resources like it was Windows or something. What do we need that crap for on a Mac? :confused:

Whenever somebody asks me about Office 2011, I recommend they try iWork and LibreOffice first. There are a handful of things Office does better and a few documents Office can open that the others can't. To me it's not worth it to have Office around.

My computer at home is a Core 2 Duo Macbook that is 4 years old. I have upgraded RAM and HDD but that's all I've done to improve performance. My computer at work is an intel i5 that is barely 1 year old. When I launch any Office app on my work machine, I have time to go plant coffee beans, water them, harvest them, roast them, grind them and brew them before Word, Excel or Powerpoint finally rears its ugly head. To me this is a sign of badly written software. Software that doesn't get smaller and faster with time or that doesn't bring important new features to justify any larger size... well that software is just plain crap. I have a lot of respect for MS Office... 97. Everything after that got bigger, slower and less useful over the years.

So for these reasons, my experience on my work machine as well as my experience with Office 2011 on my wife's Mac, I strongly suggest you consider an alternative to Office 2011 if at all possible. If you must use it, at least go find all it's nasty little bits in Activity Monitor and force quit them when you are done using Office and you will find your Mac will be more stable.
 

Krazy Bill

macrumors 68030
Dec 21, 2011
2,985
3
I strongly suggest you consider an alternative to Office 2011 if at all possible.

I always find it amusing when the handful of people that have problems with Office 2011 always condemn it for the gazillions of people using it with no problems. (Rather than exercising a little insight into oneself and theorizing it just might be their Mac and their Mac only) :D
 

iThinkergoiMac

macrumors 68030
Jan 20, 2010
2,664
4
Terra
[*]File associations got pointed first to Office 2011 and later (after reinstalling OS X) Office 2004 trial despite the fact both iWork and Libre Office were present. :rolleyes:

To be expected, and takes 3 seconds to undo. MS is hardly the only one guilty of doing this...

[*]The beachball was her constant companion and she honestly thought her Intel Mini was slower than the G4 Mini in the basement. :mad:

I have not experienced this happening, and I have installed Office '11 on both SL and Lion machines.

[*]Fonts went missing that required us to reinstall LibreOffice. :mad:

That sucks.

[*]There were 2 or 3 icons worth of MS "cruft" sitting on her menu bar sapping system resources like it was Windows or something. What do we need that crap for on a Mac? :confused:

Again, I installed Office '11 on two different machines and this did not happen to me. Did you blow through the installation, or did you take your time and read each panel? I remember disabling a few things from the installation... if you blew through it, you have no one to blame but yourself ;)
 

sitesme

macrumors newbie
Jun 21, 2009
14
0
My iMac (Mountain Lion 10.8.3) was not shutting down properly for around year. It would be stuck with the grey spinning gear and wouldn't move from here.

I tried the Safe Mode: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1455 and now it shuts down properly.

This fixed my issue and hope it helps someone.
 
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