spotlight icon is missing etc. (was: help!)

jamike · #1 March 26th, 2007, 03:51 PM

when i turned on my macbook today, so many things were not working all of a sudden! in the upper right-hand corner of the menubar, the spotlight icon is missing, also the input menu flag, and also the clock. when I try to re-enable them, they don't appear at all. when I try to run adium, it has the black arrow next to it, but it's not running. the contact list doesn't appear at all. also the dashboard starts up, but all the widgets are dead. they get stuck in the startup mode and are unusable. the screen saver is not working either. quicksilver doesn't start up on login as it should and when I try to run it manually, nothing happens. my macbook has been working flawlessly for almost two months now, guys, please help me, what could have caused this? I tried repairing permission with onyx but nothing changed. I'm not using the admin accout. the admin account seems to be working okay.

nixgeek · #2 March 26th, 2007, 04:00 PM

If the admin account is working, then it's possible that the affected account might have gotten corrupted. You can create another user and use that. I know that when you delete an old user account, you're given the option to backup the home directory of that old account. If and when you create that new account, see about deleting the old account and when prompted to backup the home directory of the old account, select to back it up. This will create a folder called Deleted Users and the old account's home directory contents will be in there in a compressed .dmg format.

Hope this helps.

jamike · #3 March 28th, 2007, 12:47 AM

i reinstalled the whole system, which obviously solved the problem, but I really hope it won't happen again, because the main reason i switched from a pc was so that I wouldn't have to reinstall the OS every couple of months...

lbj · #4 March 28th, 2007, 01:32 AM

It's a long shot, but did you have any Norton products installed?

jamike · #5 March 28th, 2007, 01:50 AM

no, I don't use any of those. I was thinking about installing Symantec, but after I heard all the stuff it can do to your computer, I just decided to rely on Macs' natural imunity against viruses.

lbj · #6 March 28th, 2007, 09:34 AM

I only asked because in the earlier days of OSX, Norton was known to cause all sorts of strange behavior. No, I wasn't implying that Norton would have helped you here.

**fryke** · #7 March 28th, 2007, 09:44 AM

It's been a long time since I've had to edit such an ingenious thread title. Hehe. *PLEASE* be specific. Anything helps, really.

jamike · #8 March 28th, 2007, 04:41 PM

lbj: no, that's what I meant. I wouldn't expect norton to help me here either. I was just saying that in the past, I thought about using it but for that exact reason you mentioned (could cause more problems than solve), I didn't install it.

fryke: my fault. should have read the forum rules properly. I'll be careful next time...