"shut down" and "about this mac" not working

stillsight · #1 July 22nd, 2005, 09:32 PM

Hi, I tried searching for threads to see if anyone's had this problem before but all I get is a blank search results page... so I'm asking anyway-

I'm on a PowerMac g4 Quicksilver 733mhz 1.1g RAM with a recent install of os 10.4.2

When I go to the apple menu and select "About this Mac" nothing happens. Nada, zilch.

When I go to "Shut Down..." and "Restart..." nothing happens. Nada, zilch.
"Log Out..." does't work either. Neither does "Force Quit..."

I had to shut down my computer using Quicksilver. I quit a hanging app through Activity Montitor.
I don't know any Terminal commands to do the same things.

I repaired permissions and checked the console for anything obvious, but I don't know what I'm doing. It's not like I really NEED that information, but it's kindof odd that I can't tell my computer to turn itself off the way I'm supposed to...

Any help would be appreciated! Thanx.

stillsight · #2 July 23rd, 2005, 04:35 PM

ex2bot · #3 July 24th, 2005, 12:13 AM

"sudo shutdown now" is a particularly ungraceful way of shutting down your machine from Terminal.

But back to your question. Hmm . . .

I don't know what process controls the Apple menu. I might check another user account to see if the same problem occurs. If so, there might be a .plist you can trash. I'll look for it.

What was the hanging app you had to Force Quit?

Doug

Darkshadow · #4 July 24th, 2005, 12:50 PM

I've had that from time to time since installing 10.4. Everything in the Apple menu just stops responding. I have no idea what causes it, but logging out will fix it.

You might say "But you can't log out, the menu doesn't work!"

But you can.

Use the keyboard shortcut Option-Shift-Command-Q ( ⌥⇧⌘Q ), and it will log you out immediately, without asking for confirmation. For whatever reason, doing the keyboard command the normal way won't work either (the confirmation dialogue never appears, so you don't get logged out).

Incidentally, if you hold the Option key down while selecting Restart or Shut Down from the menu, you won't be asked for confirmation, either, it'll just go ahead and do it.

stillsight · #5 July 24th, 2005, 03:38 PM

Thanx.

I logged in as a guest user and still the apple menu items don't do anything. I logged back in, restarted, still nothing... Can't shut down, log out, restart, force quit, or get about this mac info...

The app that was hanging was Firefox, and Safari's hung a few times too.

*shrug*