Freezing Near Clock

[deckmoney]

Has anyone had issues with the area near the clock/Spotlight freezing occasionally? I was able to replicate this quite frequently by initiating a manual .Mac sync, but have since disabled .Mac after noticing it caused this issue (both my G5 and iBook experience this issue)

Even with .Mac syncing disabled this issue has been occuring. My clock stops updating and mousing over any "Apple" items in this area of the screen gives me the spinning beach ball. Any non-Apple items in this area respond just fine. I've basically had this issue since I did a clean install of Tiger. Any reponses would be appreciated.

Edit: Is there anyway to restart this section of the screen? In Windows I would refer to this as the systray, though I'm unsure if the Mac has any name for this area of the screen. In the short term just restarting whatever is freezing up this area would work.

 

[HexMonkey]

The process called "SystemUIServer" handles all the menus in the right side of the menu bar. So if one menu freezes, all of them freeze. Since the freeze is a regular occurrence, you could experiment by disabling certain menus that you suspect could be causing the problem (by command-dragging them off the menubar or by disabling them in the appropriate pane of System Preferences) and checking if the problem occurs in each scenario.

To restart these menus after a freeze, you could type the following into Terminal:

killall "SystemUIServer"

Alternatively, you could select "SystemUIServer" from the list of processes in Activity Monitor, click the "Quit Process" button, then click "Force Quit".

Both Terminal and Activity Monitor can be found in /Applications/Utilities/.

 

[Plymouthbreezer]

I had this issue at one point too back in Panther. However, but the last few Panther issues, it seemed to fix itsself.

 

[deckmoney]

Thanks, I didn't know what the service was called. I had been using the terminal and "ps aux" to skim over the processes running, but none of them seemed so obvious that I knew what to kill. I will try killing the SystemUIServer when this happens again. Thanks for your help!