Beachball on Login (Yosemite)

[JamesRandom]

Hey all.



So on Monday I started up my mac as usual, and was surprised to see that it got stuck at the 'blurry yosemite' login screen (sans any login options, since I have automatic login on) with the spinning beach ball of doom, which was spinning really fast, twice it's normal spinning speed.



I restarted. Same thing.



I booted in safe mode, but couldn't log into my main admin account, as I just got a freeze with a normal spinning beach ball on the blurry login screen again.



So I restarted back into safe mode and went into my other admin account, which runs fine. Even in non-safe mode it runs fine on the other user account(s).



I reinstalled OSX, and this seemed to fix the problem on my main account.

Today it recurred, (after I type in my password) so I tried as best I could to find a solution and settled on re-installing again. I could login again!

I had a look around the login items in preferences, and there was one program in the list which I had uninstalled ages ago. There were a couple of plists for uninstalled items in LaunchAgents, too.

Also, Firefox was automatically open when I logged in again. FF, as many of you may know, has a bug which means it wont close properly, and you have to Force Quit. Sometimes I forget and shut down my iMac, which will simply hang until I've Force Quit Firefox. So maybe it was something to do with that?

I'm reluctant to shut down my mac again for fear of having to go through the faffle all over again.



I've fixed perms, etc. Zapped NVRAM 3 times, etc. None of that had any effect when I had the problem.

Any ideas would be great.

 

[JamesRandom]

So I've been digging around. I found a bunch of 'startup items' for apps that I'd uninstalled long ago in Application Supprt in my user/library/application and deleted those. And disabled a bunch of other 3rd party startup items.

But I still haven't found anything that I can readily identify as a concrete cause. Haven't dared turn off my mac yet, lol.

 

[Weaselboy]

But I still haven't found anything that I can readily identify as a concrete cause. Haven't dared turn off my mac yet, lol.

Just one tidbit to maybe help. When you boot to safe mode that stops all startup and login items from launching. So the fact it still happens in safe mode tells us the issue is unrelated to a startup or login item and you need to focus elsewhere.

It almost like a failing drive. If you do a verify disk in Disk Utility, does that show any problems?

 

[JamesRandom]

Just one tidbit to maybe help. When you boot to safe mode that stops all startup and login items from launching. So the fact it still happens in safe mode tells us the issue is unrelated to a startup or login item and you need to focus elsewhere.

It almost like a failing drive. If you do a verify disk in Disk Utility, does that show any problems?

Verify Disk was also one of the things I did, it says everything appears to be OK.