G5 iMac freezing, keyboard unresponsive, etc.

[cocoatronik]

Yesterday, my G5 iMac started freezing up after waking from sleep, but I was able to get it back by powering off and restarting.

Today, it's worse. When it boots up, the keyboard is unresponsive, and the mouse works only intermittently. (By intermittent, I mean that it usually boots with the mouse frozen. But if it does boot with the mouse working, then it seems to stay working.) I've tried booting with no peripherals, and it complains that it can't find a keyboard or mouse, so it's apparently recognizing the keyboard and mouse when it boots, but then "loses" them.

The mouse is a wired Mighty Mouse, and the keyboard is a wired Apple keyboard. No bluetooth.

In addition, my clock no longer displays in my menu bar. When I try to reset this, I'm able to check the box to display, but it won't take effect or retain this setting. On the other hand, I was able to reset the sleep setting to "never."

This problem does not correspond with any new hardware or software installs. I upgraded from Tiger to Leopard 10.5.5 about 3 weeks ago, but everything seemed okay until yesterday. I've repaired permissions and verified the disk.

Any ideas before I bring this in to an Apple store?

 

[cocoatronik]

Update with additional information:

In Activity Monitor, I found that the SystemUIServer was not responding. I forced this to quit, then restarted the machine, and now my clock is restored in the menu bar. This makes sense according to the MacRumor Guide for SystemUIServer, which also says that "A bad hardware state may cause the SystemUIServer to hang." What does this mean exactly? Is it possible that I just have a bad keyboard?

(Meanwhile, my keyboard functionality now seems intermittent, but my mouse still freezes when the computer wakes from sleep.)

 

[Dmac77]

Update with additional information:

In Activity Monitor, I found that the SystemUIServer was not responding. I forced this to quit, then restarted the machine, and now my clock is restored in the menu bar. This makes sense according to the MacRumor Guide for SystemUIServer, which also says that "A bad hardware state may cause the SystemUIServer to hang." What does this mean exactly? Is it possible that I just have a bad keyboard?

(Meanwhile, my keyboard functionality now seems intermittent, but my mouse still freezes when the computer wakes from sleep.)

You may want to try a PMU reset, I'm not sure about how to do it on a G5 though.

Don

 

[cocoatronik]

You may want to try a PMU reset, I'm not sure about how to do it on a G5 though.

Thanks for the suggestion. I've never heard of this before, so I did some reading, and it seems to make sense. I found instructions for an iMac G5 SMU reset (which is apparently what they called the PMU then). Naturally, the problems seem to have healed up on their own -- for the moment -- but I'll try this if the symptoms return.

Thanks again!