A part of the top menu bar not showing

[llee87]

I've restarted my Powerbook G4, but it's still doing the same thing: it's not displaying part of the top menubar (regardless of whether I'm on Firefox or the Finder or whatever app) so I can't see the time, battery/charge status, wireless, etc. I can see everything on the left half just fine (the part where it's specific for each app: File, Edit, View, History, etc). But the right half is blank, *except* for the blue circle icon with a white magnifier icon inside -- that thing is flashing...

Another thing is that I can't open excel files. Weirdly, I can open MS Word just fine. It tells me "not enough memory", but these excel files are pretty small. The thing is, I had Office 2004, and a couple of months ago I installed Office 2008. Yesterday morning, I got an "Office 2004 for Mac 11.5.5 Update" and I just clicked "Update" like I usually do... but I was running late and had to take my laptop with me so I canceled it when it was like 80% done. Could that be causing problems??

BUT I remember the night before, I had the DVD player on, set a timer to *shut down* in 20 minutes, and I remember the morning after (the morning of this Update), I saw that my laptop was (still) ON, and it had a pop-up window to say that some stuff on my computer may run erraneously because my date on the laptop was set for before 1965 or something. So then I had to go fix the clock on my laptop which was set to like 1960 January or something.

Any idea what's going on??


PS - there are additional weirdness going on, like when I change the volume using the keys on the keyboard, the transparent little box that's supposed to show up on the screen with the corresponding number of bars --- that's now showing up as just a big block of white box... And on things like Finder Windows, the top portion of the window where I should be seeing a back-arrow button and stuff, they are not showing up...

 

[llee87]

I know it hasn't even been an hour since I posted the question, but I googled and found a similar post from 2006 about a similar problem... so I decided to check my consol and there's a new crash log like every second or so, which is really freaking me out. Gahhhh what's going on? (I didn't really understand the archive and install method they were talking about. I also can't really remember installing anything recently that would have started up this problem; installed a couple of updates today though) Any ideas?

 

[Ivan P]

About your archive and install question;

Basically, it reinstalls all the system files, but keeps your documents, some settings and all the applications you've downloaded/installed.

 

[llee87]

Might you advise that I do that?

I also just realized that actually, I can't open my MS word files. It attempts to open, but it crashes and quits as soon as it opens. But as far as I can tell, all other applications are working fine (firefox, itunes, dictionary, etc)

 

[anirban]

Have you tried repairing your permissions, and performing a PRAM reset?

 

[llee87]

I've tried repairing permissions. What's a PRAM reset? Is that the thing where i press some keys while restarting the computer and keep it held until i hear 3 chimes?

 

[anirban]

I've tried repairing permissions. What's a PRAM reset? Is that the thing where i press some keys while restarting the computer and keep it held until i hear 3 chimes?

Yes, you need to hold Command+P+R keys before the grey screen pops up, and wait until your hear at least two chimes. Then release the keys.

 

[llee87]

Yeah... PRAM reset didn't change anything for me

 

[Darth.Titan]

The Spotlight icon (magnifying glass) is supposed to be all the way on the right. If it is showing, then the other icons that you say you can't see have just been removed. You just need to go into System Preferences to select the options to show them in the menu bar.

• Time option should be under the Date/Time PrefPane
• Battery option should be under the Energy Saver PrefPane
• Wireless option is probably under networking.
• For each just look for something along the lines of "Show status in menu bar"

As for your Excel problem, your failed update is probably the culprit. Try manually running Microsoft's update program and see if it can finish up, otherwise reinstalling Office and rerunning all updates should fix things.