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I've lost my minimize button!

TonyRush

TonyRush

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 26, 2006
15
0
Dothan, AL
The upper left corner of any window normally has a red, yellow and green button. The yellow one (in the middle) normally minimizes the window and places it in the Dock.

Well, mine has gone gray! It's not available anymore and I'm not able to minimize windows.

What do I need to do to turn it back on?

Thanks!
Tony
 
I didn't think that COULD be turned off..

Is this 'grayed out' in ALL windows, Finder, Safari, whatever, or just some/one particular application? Do you have any 3rd party hacks installed? Does this issue happen if you log in as another user?
 
Have you made the appearance "graphite"? That's the only other thing I could think of. Check "Appearance" in system prefs.
 
No, it's not a color scheme issue -- I'm saying the button is no longer there. The yellow is gone and the button is now gray and "non-clickable" (for lack of a better word).

It affects my MSN contact list and all Safari windows. However, it DOES work (and appear yellow) in Photoshop, Word, etc.

No 'hacks' installed. I'm a new iMac user and wouldn't know what to do with hacks anyway. LOL

Tony
 
This happened to me a month or so ago! and kept happening. after hours of trying to figure out why it was happening, I managed to pin point it down to the yahoo widget engine (konfabulator).
Do you have this running? if so, try quitting it totally and restarting, and tell me if you still have the problem. I'd be very interested to know if it actually is this...

Thanks
Ed
 
I don't have the Konfabulator. I do have some Dashboard Widgets that were downloaded some time ago...nothing recently.

Here's a screenshot that might help....
 

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Restarted and the problem seems resolved.

Any idea what caused it? (as far as normal use goes?)

Thanks for your help! I'm used to a restart solving stuff on a PC but, as a new Mac user, I've just gotten used to things working properly! This is the first reboot I've had to do since I bought the thing (other than an installation).

Tony
 
Sometimes things just.. don't work right. Macs are just computers. All technology has glitches and bugs. Chances are it will never happen again.
 
I believe I saw this particular problem one time. Hard to explain, but it's never come back.

Reboots are your friend. Once a week is a good habit, IMO.
 
I was going to color a yellow button on your screenshot for you, and tell you you were blind. I couldnt find anything in OS X to do it with though. :)
 
All digital hardware is built to tolerances, not perfection. For instance in every cpu on the planet, due to all kinds of physical phenomenon, a calculation will return an incorrect result after every 100 trillion calculations completed (or whatever the actual number is.) So after a few months of working on an octo-core xenon-merom magic powered best of the best processor computer, every so often the cpu will report to you that 2+2 = 5.

Because of this and other similar issues, every once in a blue moon every system will have some sort of random problem and all you need to do is restart the system to expunge the error. Even mastercard's servers and the mars rover's computers have occasional random problems, but on mission critical systems you have redundancy so that when one computer has the inevitible random error there is another backup computer that takes over.
 
My guess:
When you minimize a window, the computer creates a "screenshot", resizes it and then puts it onto the dock. After a certain point (maybe when system memory or available hard disk space is extremely low) the Mac decides it doesn't wanna do it anymore and thus doesn't offer you the option.

If this is indeed the cause, then restarting would work because you're free-ing up RAM and virtual memory when you restart.

I have no facts to support my claims. I wouldn't be surprised if I'm completely wrong...
 
C00rDiNaT0r said:
My guess:
When you minimize a window, the computer creates a "screenshot", resizes it and then puts it onto the dock. After a certain point (maybe when system memory or available hard disk space is extremely low) the Mac decides it doesn't wanna do it anymore and thus doesn't offer you the option.

If this is indeed the cause, then restarting would work because you're free-ing up RAM and virtual memory when you restart.

I have no facts to support my claims. I wouldn't be surprised if I'm completely wrong...
Click to expand...
Yeah thats a pretty wild guess. Don't think you're hitting on much with that one.
 
This happened to me once a couple of weeks ago. It was only a single windows of safari (I had several open), and simply closing the effected window and opening a new one in its place fixed it. Very strange problem, but I suppose that's life. :cool:
 
If this ever happens to anyone, keep in mind that Command-M will also minimize a window, or choosing Minimize from the menu bar.

Also, before restarting, you may want to try just logging out and logging back in.
 
Happens to me from time to time (At least 3 times on my PowerBook, but its happened to me on various machines). Restart fixes it.

I tend to run into lots of bugs on lots of different programs. :eek:
 
Happens all the time to me, running Tiger on a PowerMac G5. I've found that the easiest way to fix it, without rebooting, is to simply open a video file in MPlayer (perhaps QuickTime too, though I haven't tried that) and go to full screen playback, then leave full screen. The minimize button is back after doing this. It only seems to effect certain apps, such as Safari, Finder etc. I have no idea what triggers it, but I've found that it often happens for me, after playing video files on MPlayer in full screen, though it doesn't always do it.
 
Psycho Therapis said:
go to full screen playback, then leave full screen
Click to expand...

If that's the case then maybe it'd also fix the problem if you switch screen resolutions back and forth in system prefs.
 
I'm guessing we've found a bug in the WindowServer. It would be interesting to know if killing this process in the Activity Monitor fixed it.
 
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