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Resolved System Preferences not responding

L

Lewisbrah

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 20, 2011
15
0
Upgraded to Lion a few hours ago on my MacBook Pro and did a few things in system preferences(changed scrolling back to how it was) then went to mess with the new wallpapers and it gave me the pinwheel and froze up

now every time i try to open system preferences it does the same thing

so far i've tried restarting, shut down, and trying to open different things in system preferences through spotlight and it does the same thing

if anyone could help it would be greatly appreciated
 
Last edited:
happened too me as well...also froze when I went into dashboard once, just held power button and rebooted...also, my 2011 macbook pro lost about 20 secs start up time, went from 12-14 boot time to about 30-35, not a big deal but tried resets etc pram, smc, still slower booting up
 
Billymac19 said:
happened too me as well...also froze when I went into dashboard once, just held power button and rebooted...also, my 2011 macbook pro lost about 20 secs start up time, went from 12-14 boot time to about 30-35, not a big deal but tried resets etc pram, smc, still slower booting up
Click to expand...

just tried opening system preferences and then doing that and still the same result spin wheel and freeze


i too noticed the start up time takes a lot longer now
 
Same problem

Never had this issue before until now. Downloaded Lion a few hours ago. I too went into change my wallpaper and system preferences froze. Now I cannot access system preferences at all. Hopefully someone can figure this problem out.
 
abus1105 said:
Never had this issue before until now. Downloaded Lion a few hours ago. I too went into change my wallpaper and system preferences froze. Now I cannot access system preferences at all. Hopefully someone can figure this problem out.
Click to expand...

relieved to find out it's not just me having this problem but feel bad because it's pretty irritating
 
no help

just got off the phone with Apple Support. Told them my problem. They had me reinstall Lion. They said that should fix the problem. IT DIDN'T. Same problem after an hour and a half of rebooting. I can't complain about the service because the guy helped as much as he could. He said they are having plenty of problems with Lion today, mostly do to massive downloads. He assured me there would be numerous updates in the coming days. Either way it is still disappointing to have no access to any system preferences.

Keep posting if someone finds a fix.
 
abus1105 said:
just got off the phone with Apple Support. Told them my problem. They had me reinstall Lion. They said that should fix the problem. IT DIDN'T. Same problem after an hour and a half of rebooting. I can't complain about the service because the guy helped as much as he could. He said they are having plenty of problems with Lion today, mostly do to massive downloads. He assured me there would be numerous updates in the coming days. Either way it is still disappointing to have no access to any system preferences.

Keep posting if someone finds a fix.
Click to expand...

well that sucks
 
Have you been able to get into Console? If so take a look around there for anything in error and post back what you find. I'm willing to bet it may be a third-party app that has a preference pane in the System Preferences that is causing the problem.
 
SandboxGeneral said:
Have you been able to get into Console? If so take a look around there for anything in error and post back what you find. I'm willing to bet it may be a third-party app that has a preference pane in the System Preferences that is causing the problem.
Click to expand...

i see something that says

<Error>: Failed to create window context device
and
<Error>: CGWindowContextCreate: failed to create window context delegate.


thank you for the response
 
I have been able to be in console. I have found numerous errors regarding system preferences. Now, I have researched the preference panes. My problem is in the "preference pain folder" in Library has nothing in it. The other place I found anything about preference panes was in "Caches" folder. I am afraid to just go deleting things and what not.

Console Erros found as follows:

7/20/11 8:07:21.051 PM System Preferences: Failed to create window context device

7/20/11 8:07:21.051 PM System Preferences: CGWindowContextCreate: failed to create window context delegate.

7/20/11 8:07:21.051 PM [0x0-0x11011].com.apple.systempreferences: Jul 20 20:07:21 iMac.local System Preferences[163] <Error>: CGWindowContextCreate: failed to create window context delegate.

7/20/11 8:11:40.927 PM System Preferences: _initWithWindowNumber: error creating graphics ctxt object for ctxt:0x1170f, window:0x0

7/20/11 8:23:33.164 PM quicklookd: BUG in libdispatch: 11A511 - 1813 - 0x4

Sorry for the long post. If this helps anybody with a solution I would appreciate it.
 
abus1105 said:
I have been able to be in console. I have found numerous errors regarding system preferences. Now, I have researched the preference panes. My problem is in the "preference pain folder" in Library has nothing in it. The other place I found anything about preference panes was in "Caches" folder. I am afraid to just go deleting things and what not.

Console Erros found as follows:

7/20/11 8:07:21.051 PM System Preferences: Failed to create window context device

7/20/11 8:07:21.051 PM System Preferences: CGWindowContextCreate: failed to create window context delegate.

7/20/11 8:07:21.051 PM [0x0-0x11011].com.apple.systempreferences: Jul 20 20:07:21 iMac.local System Preferences[163] <Error>: CGWindowContextCreate: failed to create window context delegate.

7/20/11 8:11:40.927 PM System Preferences: _initWithWindowNumber: error creating graphics ctxt object for ctxt:0x1170f, window:0x0

7/20/11 8:23:33.164 PM quicklookd: BUG in libdispatch: 11A511 - 1813 - 0x4

Sorry for the long post. If this helps anybody with a solution I would appreciate it.
Click to expand...

the same as what i am getting
 
also this:

Warning: SUID file “System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/ARDAgent” has been modified and will not be repaired.


Could be irrelevant to the problem but thought I would add it.
 
Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3GS: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_4 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8K2 Safari/6533.18.5)

Lewisbrah said:
SandboxGeneral said:
Have you been able to get into Console? If so take a look around there for anything in error and post back what you find. I'm willing to bet it may be a third-party app that has a preference pane in the System Preferences that is causing the problem.
Click to expand...

i see something that says

<Error>: Failed to create window context device
and
<Error>: CGWindowContextCreate: failed to create window context delegate.


thank you for the response
Click to expand...

I'll try researching these in the morning, unless someone else gets to it first.

A couple of questions, do you have a good back up of your Snow Leopard installation? Are you savvy enough to perform a clean install?

Is there anything else not working?
 
SandboxGeneral said:
Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3GS: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_4 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8K2 Safari/6533.18.5)



I'll try researching these in the morning, unless someone else gets to it first.

A couple of questions, do you have a good back up of your Snow Leopard installation? Are you savvy enough to perform a clean install?

Is there anything else not working?
Click to expand...


thanks for the help

didnt back up snow leopard

can probably perform a clean install and everything else seems to be fine
 
Lewisbrah said:
the same as what i am getting
Click to expand...

exactly the same issue for me too. Have reinstalled Lion to no effect. Basically when I open the preferences pane it opens onto the Desktop / Screensaver pane and then freezes up with the same error mentioned earlier.

Tried trashing preferences, repairing permissions etc but nothing seems to fix it. Only thing left is to reformat and install from a clean start.

Unless anyone else has found a way to fix this?
 
Apple Support

For the second day, just got off the phone with Apple Support. Went through numerous troubleshooting tactics to try and solve the problem. Spent close to 30 mins doing different trouble shoots. Nothing worked. Did everything I did yesterday, but was not asked to re-reinstall Lion this time.

The bad news is they couldn't fix it over the phone.
The good news is that apparently according the them, lots of people are beginning to have this problem. Which means Apple is more quickly to come out with software updates to fix the problem.

She said that they have many reports of people going into change the wallpaper and systems preferences freezes up and stays that way.

Service was good, and helpful for future reference, but again didn't fix the problem. Advice from Apple "wait for updates that SHOULD solve the problem."

Just have to wait and see. Everything else appears to be working fine and thats a plus.
 
abus1105 said:
For the second day, just got off the phone with Apple Support. Went through numerous troubleshooting tactics to try and solve the problem. Spent close to 30 mins doing different trouble shoots. Nothing worked. Did everything I did yesterday, but was not asked to re-reinstall Lion this time.

The bad news is they couldn't fix it over the phone.
The good news is that apparently according the them, lots of people are beginning to have this problem. Which means Apple is more quickly to come out with software updates to fix the problem.

She said that they have many reports of people going into change the wallpaper and systems preferences freezes up and stays that way.

Service was good, and helpful for future reference, but again didn't fix the problem. Advice from Apple "wait for updates that SHOULD solve the problem."

Just have to wait and see. Everything else appears to be working fine and thats a plus.
Click to expand...


thanks for the info!
 
Try setting up a test user account and see if the same problem occurs. This will help determine if it is a systemwide problem or a user account specific problem.
 
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