Leopard doing strange things... Finder taking over?

[Brendon Bauer]

On a new Aluminum iMac (that has been running Leopard fine for a month or so) the computer is starting to act very strange. I first noticed that when click on something in the menu bar, it does not highlight whatever my mouse is over. For example, if I click on File, and then move my mouse down to an option below, File is highlighted but the options I mouse over do not highlight like they used to. Also, whenever I launch an application the application opens but is in the background, and finder is now the active application. Another thing is that whenever hovering over the dock, the dock does not move/resize like it usually does. Instead, it does nothing until you click on an application. As soon as you click on an app, the dock instantly changes to be zoomed in with name appearing above the app, and then after a second or two it goes back to normal. To rephrase that another way, it doesn't do "the wave" or show applications names when mousing over the dock.

Does anyone have any idea what the heck is happening? I tried repairing permissions and checking the drive for errors with Disk Utility. Nothing... Anyone? I'm not sure exactly when this started... other than that it happened in the last day or two.

 

[Brendon Bauer]

Even while mousing over the red, yellow, and green buttons at the top of each window (ie the close, minimize and resize buttons) they do not change to reflect the x - or + graphics. What the heck is going on?

 

[Brendon Bauer]

Now I just realized that my eject key activates dashboard.... and it's not set to do that... This is a nightmare. My brightness keys no longer work... same with the dedicated itunes buttons on the wireless keyboard. They aren't working either.

Quick question... is it possible to reinstall Leopard without wiping the bootcamp partition? I'd like to save everything in Windows if possible. Well, thanks in advance.

 

[akadmon]

Now I just realized that my eject key activates dashboard.... and it's not set to do that... This is a nightmare. My brightness keys no longer work... same with the dedicated itunes buttons on the wireless keyboard. They aren't working either.

Quick question... is it possible to reinstall Leopard without wiping the bootcamp partition? I'd like to save everything in Windows if possible. Well, thanks in advance.

Hey, the dashboard thing has happned to me. See my thread https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/394691/

 

[Blogger]

Try restarting while holding down the Shift key. Keep holding it until you see the log in window saying safe boot. Then click on restart.

 

[Brendon Bauer]

So, after it boots up in safe mode, don't log in? Just restart it? Wouldn't that just revert it back to what it normally is like? Or does it do something when you safe boot that carries over or fixes a normal boot?

 

[Blogger]

Yes it does. It basically performs a file system check (and repair if necessary) and dumps the system caches. It might not work, but it's worth a try.

 

[Brendon Bauer]

I just tried it this morning and it worked! Thanks so much. Rebooting now into normal mode and hopefully it's fine now. I'm just so happy I don't have to go and reinstall everything. I was planning to take a whole day off to set everything up again, but thankfully I don't have to. Yep, it works great now. I totally forgot about safe mode... I was trying everything else . Thanks so much for the tip!

Brendon