Spotlight / Menu Bar Items

[thebug]

At one point in time I had removed the spotlight icon from the menu bar, by taking the Search.bundle file from the Core Services folder located in System/Library/~ . The next step to removing it was to quit the process in activity monitor called SystemUIserver. This worked perfectly.
I also disabled the other icons in the menu bar via system preferences, without any 'hacks.'

I am currently trying to restore spotlight and the other icons to the menu bar. I have returned Search.bundle to the appropriate folder and attempted to quit the SystemUIserver process. The spotlight icon will not appear, despite restarting the computer, shutting down, etc. I will check the boxes in system preferences to show the clock in the menu bar, for example, but they will not appear and the next time I go back to the preference pane the boxes are unchecked again.

In activity monitor, the process SystemUIserver will randomly appear and disappear, as though it is having problems restarting. My guess is that this process handles the menu bar, but when I open an application called Adium, the icon will appear in the menu bar.
The only icons affected are spotlight and icons that can be turned on in system preferences (airport, clock, battery life, etc.)

Any suggestions?

 

[Mikuro]

Most third-party menu items do not use the same method Apple does. Apple doesn't make their method available to developers, so most developers use a slightly different approach. That could explain why Adium still works.

As for the problem...well, I guess the first thing to do is the ol' reliable permissions repair from Disk Utility (preferably when booted from another volume like the OS X install disc). I can't speak from experience, since I've never heard of this problem before, but it does sound like something that could be caused by bad permissions.