Lion - Spinning wheel during shut down

[Harlowgold1]

Help! When I upgraded my iMac to Lion, I noticed that when I go to close down the system starts to close down and then it goes to the gray screen with the spinning wheel and will not shut down. Two months later, I purchased and MBA and it is now doing the same thing! It drives me crazy? Any suggestions!

Thanks all! Merry Christmas - Jenny

 

[StevenMeyer]

Help! When I upgraded my iMac to Lion, I noticed that when I go to close down the system starts to close down and then it goes to the gray screen with the spinning wheel and will not shut down. Two months later, I purchased and MBA and it is now doing the same thing! It drives me crazy? Any suggestions!

Thanks all! Merry Christmas - Jenny

Sounds like it is an application, have you checked the logs?

 

[Partron22]

I can replicate your spinning beachball at shutdown by the following process:
1) Connect to a server or device over my wi-fi
2) Turn OFF my wi-fi
3) Choose Restart or Shut Down from the Apple menu.
I get a grey screen and cursor for a while, but eventually the cursor turns into a spinning beachball and the Mac does not complete shutdown.

An unresponsive network device may thus be the cause of your problem.
Here are some suggestions for dealing with that, before you're forced to hit the physical power switch:
Making Finder BeachBalls go away without rebooting

 

[GermanyChris]

It's probably writing the closedown/sleep state of your open apps to the HD

 

[Kanunu]

In my case it is Excel

I have this problem too and I think I have narrowed it down to a problem with Excel (and maybe Office generally) I have Office for Mac 2011. If I open, modify and save a file, I get the same shutdown problem. In fact I don't know if the spinning wheel ever stops. I have left it as long as 15 minutes before using the power button to shut down. If I open a spreadsheet and close it without saving, I do not have a problem. The problem seems to be tied to the save function.

To test, I downloaded OpenOffice and had the same problem.

If I force a power down using the button, startup seems a little slow but I have not measured this. If I do a second restart right after the first, it is normal. I have tried sessions without Office (Firefox, iTunes, Quicken Essentials, etc.) and never seem to have a shutdown problem if I do not save in Excel. I have not tested for the other Office applications.

I seldom do a full shutdown, but this is still a disturbing problem. I was going to post this with Apple but I am thinking maybe I should post it with Microsoft.

 

[Harlowgold1]

Kanunu

I think you may be right! I use MS Office every day!

I have this problem too and I think I have narrowed it down to a problem with Excel (and maybe Office generally) I have Office for Mac 2011. If I open, modify and save a file, I get the same shutdown problem. In fact I don't know if the spinning wheel ever stops. I have left it as long as 15 minutes before using the power button to shut down. If I open a spreadsheet and close it without saving, I do not have a problem. The problem seems to be tied to the save function.

To test, I downloaded OpenOffice and had the same problem.

If I force a power down using the button, startup seems a little slow but I have not measured this. If I do a second restart right after the first, it is normal. I have tried sessions without Office (Firefox, iTunes, Quicken Essentials, etc.) and never seem to have a shutdown problem if I do not save in Excel. I have not tested for the other Office applications.

I seldom do a full shutdown, but this is still a disturbing problem. I was going to post this with Apple but I am thinking maybe I should post it with Microsoft.

 

[Kanunu]

What logs and where are they.

Sounds like it is an application, have you checked the logs?

What logs should we check? I would like to be able to send them to Microsoft and Apple. I wonder if there is even a crash log. I am working fine, just cant shut down.

I think we may be on to something. See my first post and Harlowgold (thread starter)'s response that we are both Office users.

 

[Kanunu]

Log files

I have this problem too and I think I have narrowed it down to a problem with Excel (and maybe Office generally) I have Office for Mac 2011. If I open, modify and save a file, I get the same shutdown problem. In fact I don't know if the spinning wheel ever stops. I have left it as long as 15 minutes before using the power button to shut down. If I open a spreadsheet and close it without saving, I do not have a problem. The problem seems to be tied to the save function.

Sounds like it is an application, have you checked the logs?

Thought I might bump this up. I have attached two logs in a zip file. One is of a clean restart and one of a start that has to be aborted because of the spinning wheel.

Thanks to anyone out there who can make some sense of these.

 

[benthewraith]

Help! When I upgraded my iMac to Lion, I noticed that when I go to close down the system starts to close down and then it goes to the gray screen with the spinning wheel and will not shut down. Two months later, I purchased and MBA and it is now doing the same thing! It drives me crazy? Any suggestions!

Thanks all! Merry Christmas - Jenny

You aren't by chance using VMware Fusion are you?

 

[StevenMeyer]

Thought I might bump this up. I have attached two logs in a zip file. One is of a clean restart and one of a start that has to be aborted because of the spinning wheel.

Thanks to anyone out there who can make some sense of these.

Hrmmmm Im a little tired but it looks like a temp file. Try clearing your cache. also make sure itunes is quit first.

 

[Kanunu]

Problem solved (for me at least)

Hrmmmm Im a little tired but it looks like a temp file. Try clearing your cache. also make sure itunes is quit first.

During February, I spent over an hour over three days with Apple technicians trying to nail down this problem. They had me delete whole folders of hidden files, temp files, caches, etc. that I would never have dared to myself. Of course when we were done, all my passwords were gone but still no proper shutdown.

In the end Apple techs said they could not figure it out but to try to reinstall MS Office. As this would take a while, (even longer than usual as I had an older version and an upgrade,) I did not do it.

Now the problem seems to have magically gone away. I think it was the Mac OS X 10.7.3 v.1.0 upgrade that I installed on 3/5 that made it work. Apparently the technicians that answer your questions at Apple are not informed of all that is coming down the pike. Fortunately they took the problem on for no charge even though my iMac is more than one year old.