Invisible processes showing up in menu bar

slur

Geek / Hedonist
This is a really bizarre behavior.

If I right-click on an item in the Dock to select a contextual menu item (i.e., "Empty Trash") the popup menu appears but my selection is ignored. At that point "Dock" becomes the active application and even appears as such in the menu bar. However, neither the "Dock" menu nor the Apple Menu work while "Dock" is the front application. If I again right-click on the Dock at this point the contextual menus will work, but of course "Dock" remains the front process until I choose another app.

At another point in messing around with this bizarritude "loginwindow" became the active application, and again the menu bar ignored my clicks.

What's going on here? Could it be some other application or process is causing this behavior? Does it have something to do with the fact that I've been relaunching the Dock from a shell script? Is it my karma?

I need to look into this further....
 
The cause of this bizarre behavior, believe it or not, was using kill to relaunch the Dock. The correct way to quit the Dock from Terminal is to use Applescript like so:

echo 'tell application "Dock" to quit' | osascript
 
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