Hot corners and command tab stop working

[beavereng]

Hello Folks,

I recently have been running into problems with my Macbook Pro in that an hour or two after startup, the hot corners no longer work and command tab no longer works. That is when I try to use them nothing happens at all. The keyboard still functions normally other than that. Also, if I then try to shutdown the system appears to begin the shutdown in that my desktop icons disappear, but then the machine just sits there and will never shutdown. I am then forced to hold the power key down to force a hard shutdown. Then once I do a startup, I have my hot corners back and command tab works. Until it sits for a while and then I start the cycle over.

Also, it only has done this when I am at home and not at work. The only difference between the setups (that I am aware of anyway) is that I have a different external monitor and I use wireless network at home and I am hard wired at work. The same apps are running at home and work. One other difference is that my computer is in use almost 100% of the time at work where at home it will sit allowing the screen saver to kick in.

I am running a Mac OSX 10.5.6 with the latest updates. I recently installed the Netflix Instant Watch software. But I don't know if it started then or not. Any ideas anyone? This is the first real problem I have had with any Mac I have owned.

 

[gdphishman817]

I am having the EXACT same problem as you. I'm on Dual 2.0 ghz powermac G5 with 10.5.6. Same deal. Command tab doesn't work. Hot corners don't work and restart hangs up.

 

[TuffLuffJimmy]

Gah, I've only noticed the loss of hotcorners, but it is crazy annoying.

 

[fczuardi]

Try force quitting the Screen Saver proccess…

It worked for me, I have recently changed my screensaver to that one of the itunes album covers (with clock on top) and then my cmd+tab stopped working… I've opened the Activity Monitor to see what was going on and the screensaver was stalled, I force-quitted it and life was good again

 

[apfhex]

I think your issue is the same as mine that i posted the other day -> https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/659250/

Basically, command tab stops working, Dashboard, Spotlight, Launchbar, and Bowtie hotkeys and hot corners all stop working (I can bring them up manually with the mouse still), and I can't logout/shutdown because it just hangs there like you said. I can't figure out what's causing it because I haven't changed anything. It's completely random... it was happening to me last night, but I put my Mac to sleep and today it's working fine again without having to restart. Looking in Activity Monitor when this happens I don't see any stalled processes.

 

[apfhex]

I still don't know what's causing this or why it only started recently, but I did find a stopgap solution: type sudo shutdown -r now in the Terminal. This will issue a KILL command to all processes and reboot the machine and works perfectly when a regular reboot command won't. I think there's an option to shutdown as well... you can lookup the man page for it in Terminal.