Strange beachball only on top right of menu bar

[funaifdd]

This one is really driving me nuts. If I put my system to sleep and then resume it everything is fine except for the top right of the menu bar where the time, airport, volume, bluetooth and spotlight icons are. If I move the mouse over them it turns into the beachball, move it away and it's fine.

I have looked into running processes and nothing out of the ordinary is running, nothing consuming over 4% of CPU

I have repaired permissions

I have deleted the finder plist and cache folders and nothing.

If I logout and login again it is fine.

My machine is a Dual 2Ghz PowerMac with 2GB of RAM

Has anyone come across anything like this before?

 

[jsw]

I cannot help with the solution, but I can confirm that I've seen this on my 12" PB (1.25GB RAM) and my new 17" Intel iMac (1.5GB RAM), but, curiously, not my Dual 2Ghz PowerMac (3.5GB of RAM) - all running the latest version of Tiger.

It does seem to affect the entire right-hand side of the menubar, and it does - sometimes after a LONG time - go away.

It might be AirPort related - is your PM wired to the net or wireless?

 

[funaifdd]

I cannot help with the solution, but I can confirm that I've seen this on my 12" PB (1.25GB RAM) and my new 17" Intel iMac (1.5GB RAM), but, curiously, not my Dual 2Ghz PowerMac (3.5GB of RAM) - all running the latest version of Tiger.

It does seem to affect the entire right-hand side of the menubar, and it does - sometimes after a LONG time - go away.

It might be AirPort related - is your PM wired to the net or wireless?

I don't have the AirPort switched on, I have a wired connection to the net. For a while I had thoughts that it might be related to the DVD player software (which is terrible, but that's another story)

 

[jsw]

If I can ever isolate the problem, I'll write back. So far, I've seen it on two systems (with completely different architectures), so I'm sure it's not a HW issue.

 

[funaifdd]

If I can ever isolate the problem, I'll write back. So far, I've seen it on two systems (with completely different architectures), so I'm sure it's not a HW issue.

Thanks, I'll do likewise if I ever figure it out. I suspect it's related to 10.4.4 as I don't recall it happening before that

 

[croshtique]

I've had this problem before - the culprit was a hanging SystemUI Server (and curiously iTunes was hung at the same time). Don't know what caused it but couldn't fix it without restarting. Hasn't happened to me since I updated to 10.4.4.

 

[XNine]

I've had this problem before - the culprit was a hanging SystemUI Server (and curiously iTunes was hung at the same time). Don't know what caused it but couldn't fix it without restarting. Hasn't happened to me since I updated to 10.4.4.

This sounds correct. What you want to do is immediately launch ACTIVITY MONITOR and see if SystemUIServer is RED. If so, it means that it's hung. I've had problems with this too (and it also took luanchd down with it). IF you ForceQuit SystemUIServer from Activity Monitor it should restart itself.

What you also may want to do, is open Console and go into the system.log and see if this error pops up anywhere:
IOATAController. IF you see this mentioned, it oculd be a faulty hard drive. I just took one of my Macs into the Genius Bar yesterday, and the Genius was like "you're probably 100% right. Let's just swap the drive."

 

[croshtique]

This sounds correct. What you want to do is immediately launch ACTIVITY MONITOR and see if SystemUIServer is RED. If so, it means that it's hung. I've had problems with this too (and it also took luanchd down with it). IF you ForceQuit SystemUIServer from Activity Monitor it should restart itself.

When I force-quit SystemUIServer it never restarted itself, so had to reboot instead. Anyhoo, thankfully I haven't had this problem since 10.4.4

 

[Littlemeow]

Same symptoms in Leopard 10.5.2

Here to tell you the same symptoms appear mysteriously on my old, old PPC Mini. I've just now read the first posts in this thread and I'll post back when next occurs after checking the status of SystemUIServer.

 

[Winklemanus]

It was the bluetooth...

After resetting PRAM, removing multiple 3rd party S/W and many other S/W fixes, I finally found a solution to this one: the Bluetooth module (H/W) was dead...bought and installed a new one...everything's wonderful.

Yours may be intermittent... try accessing it in the sys pref.

http://www.ifixit.com/info/install-difficulty Note: in my case, the beachball of death was spinning when ever the mouse was over spotlight...the menubar routine kept looking for the BT, never found it. Until I replaced it with a new one. used the same steps you did below.

Quote:
Originally Posted by croshtique
I've had this problem before - the culprit was a hanging SystemUI Server (and curiously iTunes was hung at the same time). Don't know what caused it but couldn't fix it without restarting. Hasn't happened to me since I updated to 10.4.4.
This sounds correct. What you want to do is immediately launch ACTIVITY MONITOR and see if SystemUIServer is RED. If so, it means that it's hung. I've had problems with this too (and it also took luanchd down with it). IF you ForceQuit SystemUIServer from Activity Monitor it should restart itself.

What you also may want to do, is open Console and go into the system.log and see if this error pops up anywhere:
IOATAController. IF you see this mentioned, it oculd be a faulty hard drive. I just took one of my Macs into the Genius Bar yesterday, and the Genius was like "you're probably 100% right. Let's just swap the drive."

 

[tlcook100]

This one is really driving me nuts. If I put my system to sleep and then resume it everything is fine except for the top right of the menu bar where the time, airport, volume, bluetooth and spotlight icons are. If I move the mouse over them it turns into the beachball, move it away and it's fine.

I have looked into running processes and nothing out of the ordinary is running, nothing consuming over 4% of CPU

I have repaired permissions

I have deleted the finder plist and cache folders and nothing.

If I logout and login again it is fine.

My machine is a Dual 2Ghz PowerMac with 2GB of RAM

Has anyone come across anything like this before?

[doublepost=1487888044][/doublepost]I have been having this exact same problem for the last 2-3 months. Can't figure it out. I also have to restart to clear it.