Dock & Expose gone, as well as black backgrounds in text/dynamic fields.

[andrewplatham]

I installed the updates yesterday and restarted. Upon restart, the dock was gone. I went into the preferences, and made sure everything was correct with the settings. Also, the background image is going bezerk, changing every 3-4 seconds, even thought it's not set to do so. Expose is not working, the "Application Switcher" (cmd + tab, sorry, don't know proper name) is not working, and there is a strange black background in nearly every window.

Screenshot of what is happening is posted here:
http://www.orange151.com/access/andrew/Picture2.png

Please note weird look of text on windows, and black backgrounds in the fields.

I've repaired permissions and restarted multiple times. i've never had this happen before... so weird.

thanks for any assistance!

 

[andrewplatham]

Update...

per a suggestion from a friend, i created a new user account to see if the problem was only for my account.

* Created a new account, with admin privileges.
* Logged out of my account. It wouldn't log out. kept bringing me back to the "log in from screen saver" box. i kept inputting user and password, and would go black, then back to that box.
* Did a "hard" restart by pressing power button. I powered up again, and it stayed at the blue background with rotating circle for about 10 minutes.
* unplugged machine, waited 30 seconds. started up again.
* i was taken to login screen, and both accounts showed up... but they had a black background, and when i clicked on the account, the text was aliased and nearly invisible due to weird black background. logged in on test account.
* every problem still there.

 

[andrewplatham]

more tries...

Tried Safe Mode... no dice. tried it twice, and never got past the first white screen with apple logo. waited about 5 minutes both times.

Tried installation disc, and got past white screen, but stalled on blue screen with nothing on it. it's still sitting there like that, because now i'm afraid to do anything else.

thanks for any further tips.

 

[frankblundt]

Jeepers.

Are you backed up?
Do you have AppleCare? - did you make a bootable copy of TechTool Deluxe?or a Rescue Disk?

What kind of Mac is it, running what version of OSX?

Did you try fsck? - details on startup issues from Apple

It may be just an issue with a corrupt system preference, but it won't hurt to eliminate physical defects and file system corruptions first. The fact that it won't boot from the install disk is not a good sign...

 

[frankblundt]

and while we're dealing with stock responses to unknown horrors:
how about zapping the PRAM?

 

[andrewplatham]

reply...

iMac 27" 2.16 Mac OS X (10.5.6)

will try the disk utility and fsck. thanks...