Mac Troubleshooting

This page is a compilation of Mac troubleshooting tips and tricks.

Symptom: Flashing Menu Bar in Mac OS X.

A few days ago we had a gentleman call us up about his iMac acting a little weird.  The menu bar at the top of the screen would flash on and off rendering his finder completely useless.  We told hi to bring it in thinking it would be a 10-20 minute fix and maybe worse case scenario an archive and install.  Well, it was not so . . . 

He brought it in and we took a look at it.  Sure enough, the menu bar would flash on and off and none of the Finder commands would work.  You couldn’t click on any of the menu bar items or the Finder in the dock.  The only way you could shut the thing off was to use the ctrl+option+command+eject shortcut.  Torrey, Erik and I did some Googling and found that we were not the only ones trying to fix this problem.  Plenty of people were experiencing the same thing but no one had a fix!  After a few hours of trial and error, we finally threw in the towel and decided and upgrade to Leopard was in order (he was currently running 10.4 Tiger.)  The upgrade completed, computer restarted and  . . . dang!  Same thing.  Looks like an Archive and Install will have to do.  Reboot from the Leopard DVD, Archive and Install, computer reboots and . . . . CRAP!  How is this possible?!!!  Same stupid flashing menu bar.

At this point Torrey knew he was going to have to dig even deeper.  He started by going into the root and creating a new user account.  The first sign of progress – when he booted up with the new account no flashing menu bar.  Cool!  At least now we knew that it wasn’t system wide but instead just related to his user account.  But where was the problem?  Quite honestly, I don’t remember how Torrey found it but he narrowed it down to a problem with his Preferences Folder.  He tested each preference one by one to find the corrupt file and oddly enough, they all checked out ok.  Turns out the problem was with the Preferences Folder itself.  Torrey transferred all the preferences into another folder, renamed it “Preferences” and replaced the old, corrupt Preferences Folder with the new one and Voila – no more flashing menu bar.

So those of you with the same problem, check out your Preferences Folder and you could save yourself a lot of time and frustration.  If that doesn’t work . . . well, I happen to know a guy who sells Mac’s for a living  =)

TB