Toolbar at the top of the screen is gone

P

paulwhite

Registered
All,
Citrix was installed on my Mac and now when I rebooted it, it just sat there with an error message on a grey screen...I did some searching and it was the Mac equivalent of the blue screen on Windows PCs...so I then rebooted the computer into Safe mode. This time it booted up, but none of my desktop icons are present, there is no hard drive icon on my desktop, AND the toolbar at the top of the screen is gone. I DO have the default toolbar at the bottom of the screen. If I click on any of the applications on the toolbar at the bottom (Safari, AOL IM, Mozilla, iCalendar, etc they will run, and also at that point a toolbar DOES appear at the top of the screen. But as soon as I close the application the toolbar disappears.

One funny thing that happens though...when I click on the finder, it wont run. I can click on the icon on the toolbar at the bottom of the screen but nothing happens. I can cliock on all of the other apps there and they run fine, but the finder wont run.

Anyone have any idea how I can correct this? I booted to a command line (My 2nd home lol) and I see all my files in the Users directory, etc. Since I only have one user on here I tried renaming my preferences folder and rebooting but I still got the same thing happening.

Any help is MUCH appreciated. Thanks! :)
 
The fact that you can actually boot all the way into Safe mode is a good sign.

First, try repairing your permissions. Have you done this before? Some basic instructions are in this thread.

It might be a good idea to do this from the OS X install disc, since you're having trouble booting normally (they say you can run disk repair operations in safe mode, but I've never done it and can't verify).

If repairing permissions doesn't work, you should boot to the command line again and fsck the disk from there. Some instructions on fsck in OS X are available here.

Note that the confusing reference in that document to "fsck-space-minus-y" is supposed to mean "fsck -y", which means "run fsck, and answer 'yes' by default to any questions it asks me". In "classical" fsck documentation, you get told that running with the -y flag is dangerous. OS X people tend to recommend runnning with -y, because you're going to want to take fsck's advice anyway.
 
To me, it sounds like something's just locking up Finder and keeping it from loading. And by the fact that you can boot into safemode, I'd suspect a 3rd party login item.

This can be investigated pretty easily. Just launch one of your programs from the Dock to get your menubar to show, then open System Prefs from the Apple menu. From there, go into the Accounts tab, select your user, and click the Login Items button.

Remove anything that isn't Apple's and reboot. Keep your fingers crossed while doing this. No really, it helps ;)
 
This is a long shot, but some people report that "badly" named files on your Desktop can prevent the Finder from launching, or send the Finder into an indefinite crash-relaunch-crash loop.

In the terminal, navigate to your Desktop and take a look at the filenames of the files there -- are there any that are extremely long, or have strange/illegal characters in the name?
 
ElDiablo, your comment about "bad" files got me thinking about a folder full of pictures that has been giving me similar trouble. It's the folder where my camera imports images. I keep it in thumbnail view sorted by created date.

When I open/edit/save any image from this folder (not the Desktop) in Photoshop
...and then return to the finder window
... the Finder crashes/relaunches

I looked an there were no weird image names... They were all uniform names fromt he camera with nothing odd.

BUT...
...looking at the permissions there was a mix of groups assigned including staff, admin, and unknown. I reset these all to group staff and Voila... Finder crashing problem is gone!
 
ra3ndy said:
To me, it sounds like something's just locking up Finder and keeping it from loading. And by the fact that you can boot into safemode, I'd suspect a 3rd party login item.

This can be investigated pretty easily. Just launch one of your programs from the Dock to get your menubar to show, then open System Prefs from the Apple menu. From there, go into the Accounts tab, select your user, and click the Login Items button.

Remove anything that isn't Apple's and reboot. Keep your fingers crossed while doing this. No really, it helps ;)
Click to expand...


Thanks for the tip. I got to the System Preferences screen but when I click on User Accounts I get that spinning wheel. Is there a way I cn disable login items through Single User Mode from a command line? I am very familiar with working from there...
 
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