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Menu bar keeps disappearing

M

Macomaniac

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 4, 2006
7
0
London
Two days ago the menu bar on my iBook G4 (OS X 10.3.9) went mad. When I start the iBook the right part of the menu bar (clock, wireless connection etc.) appears from the right to the left (as it should) but when all the icons are loaded it starts loading again for quite a while and then suddenly all the icons disappear and I can't get them back on the screen until the icons eventually reappear on their own only to disappear again. It looks like the finder tries to load them again and again until it stops eventually.

I don't know if this has to do with the installation of Norton AntiVirus 10. At least I noticed the problem only after the installation because the Symantec logo appeared on the right corner and more and more of the same Symantec logos appeared from the right to the left until they were replaced by the regular icons (time etc.) and then the whole thing starts again.

Can anybody help?
 
Erm... Uninstall Norton if possible. Even if it's not causing these issues, it's a notoriously buggy and resource-hungry app which is essentially useless for most users.

It could possibly be a permissions problem (that the Norton install probably caused) so try repairing them from Disk Utility in the Utilities folder. :)
 
Thanks for the reply Mad Jew,

I did unistall Norton, I also run Permission Repair and I also tried with Disk Doctor but the problem persists...
 
Hello yellow,

I logged in under tho different users and the problem disappeared! It's seems only my own account is the problem...
 
There was a thread about this a few months ago but I cant yet find it. this same thing happend to several others including me, all on either a powerbook or an ibook. unfortunately everything that we tried to fix it failed and we were all left with the only option to do a clean install:(
Im sure its not Norton AntiVirus 10 because I didnt have that app. did you update tiger anytime in the past few days? That was something we all had in common. I will say that since the clean install no problems at all. Even with updates.

I will post the thread as soon as I find it.
Sorry dude, I was in the same boat.

well the threads only go back til 12/5/05. This happend about Novemberish so I cant seem to pull it up.
Here are things I remember we tried but to no avail;

-archive and install twice
-logging in as admin (it is impossible seeing that the finder is constantly rebooting to do just about anything)

ADMIN- if you could find this thread it would be helpfull. called "Help, my finder keeps rebooting" or something like that. posted around the time of that major update to tiger in Oct-Nov?
 
Macomaniac said:
Hello yellow,

I logged in under tho different users and the problem disappeared! It's seems only my own account is the problem...
Click to expand...
Glad to hear you fixed it. This was one of the attempts one of us tried but with no avail. I would suggest you delete that user account.
 
Macomaniac said:
I logged in under tho different users and the problem disappeared! It's seems only my own account is the problem...
Click to expand...

Well, that's a good thing because it means it's fixable. My fiurst suggestion would be to remove all login items for your normal account. They can be found in the "LOgin Items" tab under the Accounts prefpane. Remove everything from that list, logout, and log back in.. does the problem persist?
 
Thanks freeny,

I haven't upgradedn my OS to Tiger yet do my iBook still runs with OS X 10.3.9. Deleting the account would mean deleting my own admin account - so clean install, right?

You think it would help if I upgrade to Tiger (it would save me the hassle with all the re-installation...)?
 
I don't have a "Login Items" tab just a "Startup Items" one along with PASSWORD, PICTURE, SECURITY...
 
Macomaniac said:
Thanks freeny,

I haven't upgradedn my OS to Tiger yet do my iBook still runs with OS X 10.3.9. Deleting the account would mean deleting my own admin account - so clean install, right?

You think it would help if I upgrade to Tiger (it would save me the hassle with all the re-installation...)?
Click to expand...
Not sure, still surprised you can log in:confused:

Still, a clean install would probably be a good thing if you can. While you are at it Tiger is a nice OS but probably not necessary.
 
This happened to me once too. Under all users the Finder kept restarting - had to reinstall.

If it's just one user then try moving the folders in user>Library> somewhere else and reboot do it from another account in Terminal maybe - or boot from the your latest clone (you do have one - right ;) ) where the problem wasn't there.
 
Macomaniac said:
I don't have a "Login Items" tab just a "Startup Items" one along with PASSWORD, PICTURE, SECURITY...
Click to expand...

OK, then Startup Items is the same thing in Panther. Sorry I don't have any Panther boxes around aymore.

I completely disagree with everyone that is telling you to reinstall. This problem is ONLY with your normal user and therefore it is not a system-wide problem. If it WAS system-wide, then a reinstall might be a good idea, but in this instance, it's competely unneccesary. AND if you did an Archive & install and preserverd user information, well you'd STILL have the problem once it was all done wasting that time.
 
I agree with Yellow here, no need to reinstall.

After having removed all the log in items, and if that still doesn't help, why don't you try to delete the finder preferences file. Often when an application crashes on launch it is due to a corrupt preference file. Delete the com.apple.finder.plist file which you can find in:
youruserfolder/library/preferences

If that doesn't help, I would use tiger cache cleaner to clean caches (look it up on versiontracker)

Cheers
 
yellow said:
OK, then Startup Items is the same thing in Panther. Sorry I don't have any Panther boxes around aymore.

I completely disagree with everyone that is telling you to reinstall. This problem is ONLY with your normal user and therefore it is not a system-wide problem. If it WAS system-wide, then a reinstall might be a good idea, but in this instance, it's competely unneccesary. AND if you did an Archive & install and preserverd user information, well you'd STILL have the problem once it was all done wasting that time.
Click to expand...
We all hope you are right. It would be nice to have a quick solution for people who like myself, had/have this problem. In my situation I was the only user and couldnt log in as anyone else nor did I even have the opportunity due to the immediate crashing once the finder started.
 
freeny said:
We all hope you are right. It would be nice to have a quick solution for people who like myself, had/have this problem. In my situation I was the only user and couldnt log in as anyone else nor did I even have the opportunity due to the immediate crashing once the finder started.
Click to expand...

Which is precisely the reason you should have an alternate admin user account created with a very strong password (for obvious reasons), and turn off Auto-Login.
 
Repair Permissions = waste of time. It's always the first thing that's recommended in these forums too. It should be the last thing that you try, because it will probably be least effective at solving the issue.

The long and painfull solution would be to make a new user, pull things one at a time from your old broken account into your new user account that doesn't have the menubar problem. Once that's done then you will either get a recurrance of the issue on a particular file transfer, at which point you would've pinpointed your problem, OR your new user account will never show sings of this bug at all. If you don't want to do this, then a clean install may be the way to go.

http://www.macworld.com/forums/ubbt...296547&page=14&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1 That thread discusses a similar issue to your own, wich may have been caused by QuickBooks 2005.

Also, your Info.plist file may have gotten fux0red by an application some how.
Altering Info.plist in the Contents folder of every running app's package,
including the Finder (Finder.app), one can eliminate the Menu Bar
completely. The trick is to create a new key-value pair:

<key> NSUIElement </key>
<string> 1 </string>

Once everything is restarted, including Finder.app, there will be no
menu drawn along the top of the screen. In some cases, the menu bar
clock will continue to display, hanging in space. Most of the time,
though, it disappears.
 
I noticed something sorta funny, on OS X 10.2 at least, when you open up the applications list, by mashing cmd + opt + esc, the menu bar disappears when the list becomes active.

Just trying to help, I have no idea what caused your problem, but these are possible things to look into.
 
Just wanted to give everybody an update on my problem with the menu bar. I tried YELLOW's and FRENETIC's suggestions but nothing worked. So I decided to replace the whole Library in my account with the Library I had in my last Backup - and guess what: IT WORKED! The menu bar doesn't flash or disappear any more. Of course I have to do some adjustments in some of my app but hey, that's worth it. I hope this is it and I maganed to get rid of the problem.

Thanks to you all for your precious help guys. If the problem reappears I will see me again on this forum.
 
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