There\'s a white box on my screen and it will not go away.

[troger]

I just installed Tiger from the CDs and when I re-started, a white box appears on my desktop and I can't get rid of it. It's not a window, or at least it doesn't have a title bar. I can't move it or close it. I can work around it but anything that is behind it is covered up, so I have to move windows to the right. It is about 2"x2" and is in the upper left. All the way to the left, and about 1" from the top. The box does not show up until the dock and all my desktop icons show up, so at the very end of the start-up process.

I've attemptempted to do a re-installation but the same thing occurs.

Any suggestions?

[perfessor101]

The last time I ran into that, it was an application that was starting up in the classic environment during boot time and crashing it could close down normally. Be sure you don't have a classic application starting at boot time.

If you are not using the classic environment or that does not solve the issue, start by deactivating everything in System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items and anything you find in the StartupItems folders in the Library folder at the drive root and in your user folder.

Next, look in Activity Monitor probably under My Processes. You can selectively quit processes until the rectangle disappears and you will have identified the offending application. Since you just installed Tiger it is likely some utility or startup application or utility that is incompatible with OS X 10.4 -- there are a lot of them due to internal changes in the OS. I have yet to run into one that did not offer a free update for Tiger compatibility.

If you don't find anything that way, go to the Console application and scroll back to the beginning of the default log file and see if you find errors or failures reported during startup.