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Finder at Boot Question

goinskiing

goinskiing

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 25, 2008
914
11
Meridian, ID
Hey all,

When I boot fresh into Mac OSX, the pull down menus for View, Go, etc. are all grayed out (refer to pic). Also, I have to manually connect to the Wireless here at work (use to come up like a charm).

Now, if I click Finder in the dock, or any app for that matter, the menus are back to normal, but still have to connect to wi-fi manually.

I posted this in a different thread but possibly the wrong forum area.

When it changed:
It changed when I was using LiteIcon to change the Finder icon. I relaunched finder and it hung and it recommended that I go to Tools -> "Delete System Cache." It said something about boot cache or something like it after I did this.

Would a PRAM reset fix this, or any other suggestions. I'll be more wary of anything now that has reference to caches (I guess I'm still trying to get out of the PC mindset of clearing temp files, caches, etc).

Anyway, any suggestion or help would be appreciated.

-goinskiing
 

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A PRAM reset will NOT fix this. Resetting it WILL fix startup-related issues, such as the Mac booting into Firewire target disk mode when it's not supposed to.

I'd try repairing permissions from Disk Utility at this point. It may fix permission problems causing this odd behavior.
 
wrldwzrd89 said:
A PRAM reset will NOT fix this. Resetting it WILL fix startup-related issues, such as the Mac booting into Firewire target disk mode when it's not supposed to.

I'd try repairing permissions from Disk Utility at this point. It may fix permission problems causing this odd behavior.
Click to expand...

Okay, I'll give that a try and let you know if it works.
 
Well, that fixed the wifi startup issue, so that's good.

Now about the grayed out menu. Is that normal and I didn't notice it before, or is there something else I need to fix?
 
That is very odd. The greyed out menu thing may be caused by incorrect permissions in your user folder, which the repair permissions tool won't fix. You can check to see if the permissions are correct by running a little Terminal command:

Code: 
ls -l

The output should look something like this:
Code: 
drwxr-x--- Desktop wrldwzrd89 wrldwzrd89 08/08/2008
drwxr-x--- Documents wrldwzrd89 wrldwzrd89 08/08/2008
drwxr-x--- Library wrldwzrd89 wrldwzrd89 08/08/2008
drwxr-x--- Music wrldwzrd89 wrldwzrd89 08/08/2008
drwxr-x--- Movies wrldwzrd89 wrldwzrd89 08/08/2008
drwxr-x--- Pictures wrldwzrd89 wrldwzrd89 08/08/2008
drwxr-xr-x Public wrldwzrd89 wrldwzrd89 08/08/2008
drwxr-xr-x Sites wrldwzrd89 wrldwzrd89 08/08/2008
Where "wrldwzrd89" will be your short user name.
 
There we go. My bad.

Not sure where the "staff" comes from.

Last login: Fri Aug 8 10:38:41 on ttys000
matthews-macbook-pro:~ Dykman$ ls -l
total 256
drwx------+ 7 Dykman staff 238 Aug 8 10:40 Desktop
drwx---rwx+ 33 Dykman staff 1122 Aug 7 08:51 Documents
drwx------+ 19 Dykman staff 646 Aug 7 10:55 Downloads
-rw-r--r--@ 1 Dykman staff 0 Oct 26 2010 Home.app
drwx------+ 44 Dykman staff 1496 Aug 5 08:08 Library
drwx------+ 11 Dykman staff 374 Jul 27 20:24 Movies
drwx------+ 7 Dykman staff 238 Jul 11 22:06 Music
drwx------+ 30 Dykman staff 1020 Aug 8 09:27 Pictures
drwxr-xr-x+ 5 Dykman staff 170 Jun 30 19:13 Public
drwxr-xr-x+ 5 Dykman staff 170 Jun 30 19:13 Sites
matthews-macbook-pro:~ Dykman$
Click to expand...
 
goinskiing said:
There we go. My bad.

Not sure where the "staff" comes from.
Click to expand...
Everything looks normal, except for that rwx for everyone on Documents. That's not normal, but it shouldn't be causing your problem. The staff entry is normal - that's your group. I simply forgot about it. :eek:

That said, the next place to look is Finder's preferences and cache files, since you said this issue primarily affects Finder. The user-specific files are in your user folder, in Library. There's two folders in there - one called Caches and one called Preferences. In the Caches folder you'll find some more folders - one of them will have "Finder" in its name. Delete it. In the Preferences folder, you'll find a file called com.apple.Finder.plist. Move this file to your Desktop. Once that's done, relaunch the Finder.
 
Well, I didn't find any folders with finder in it's name or any other file in the cache folder. I then moved the com.apple.Finder.plist from preferences to the desktop, relaunched, then rebooted and still gray. I'm still learning my way around Mac OSX (2 month convert) so I'm not even entirely sure if it's a finder issue or not.

By the way, thanks for your help.
 
I forgot to mention the global caches, located in Macintosh HD -> Library -> Caches. Finder may store some cache files in here.
 
A-ha!

I found the culprit. I found it in my login programs and what was causing it was smcFanControl. I have it start on boot and it make the menus inaccessible until I click on another program. Interesting. I wonder if I can still have it start on boot without that. It's not really a functionality thing, just a small quirk.
 
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