Bluetooth Preventing Sleep and Shutdown

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Bluetooth Preventing Sleep and Shutdown

I'm having a strange issue with Bluetooth on my MacBook Pro. Sometimes, if I for any reason lose the connection to a bluetooth device (move out of range, interference - anything), even momentarily, the following weird things happen:

1. I cannot shut off bluetooth power — If I hit "turn bluetooth off" the button greys out but Bluetooth is still labeled as being on and Bluetooth devices can still connect and be used.

2. The machine cannot be put to sleep. Selecting sleep from the menu does absolutely nothing, as does closing the lid.

3. The machine cannot be shut down. Selecting shut down simply leaves me at a blue screen with the spinning progress indicator forever.

4. This one is really strange: Graphics performance is reduced. This is noticed with animations within the system. For example, bringing up dashboard, the widgets fly onto the screen in a very "jerky" fashion, while normally it is perfectly smooth. Strangely, other animations seem unaffected (the water drop effect when adding new dashboard widgets is still smooth).

I have a hard time reproducing this one. It does not occur if connections to bluetooth device are lost shortly after a restart. All I can say is that if the machine has been on for awhile and a connection to any bluetooth device is lost, all the above symptoms appear. I have not been able to find any process chugging CPU or hogging RAM during this weirdness. Also, the problem does not occur if I manually shut off the bluetooth power — only when device connections are lost while Bluetooth is active.

MacBook Pro 15 2.33 C2D, Mac OS X (10.4.10)

Posted on Oct 22, 2007 10:56 AM

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Answer 1

Oct 31, 2007 8:03 PM in response to gordon142

I suffer all the same symptoms: greyed out bluetooth power button but bluetooth power still says it's on (though I can't seem to reconnect a bluetooth device); sleep menu item does nothing; closing the lid does not sleep the machine; shutdown will not complete, hanging on blue screen with spinning indicator forever.

I have no idea how to fix and didn't even know the bluetooth and won't sleep issues were related until seeing some posts here.

Any help anyone? Hardware problem? Software? Give us a clue!

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Answer 2

Oct 31, 2007 9:33 PM in response to gordon142

A number of sleep-related issues can appear after incremental Mac OSX updates, including the inability to properly go to sleep, problems waking from sleep, and having your display go to sleep without your Mac going to sleep. The most common culprit is Bluetooth. Try these tips to fix your sleep problems.
WAKE UP
In System Preferences>Bluetooth, uncheck Allow Bluetooth Devices To Wake This Computer. If you are using a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard, you'll have to wake your Mac by pressing the power button.
FILE CORRUPTION
Your Bluetooth preference file may be corrupt-you'll need to delete it. Turn Bluetooth off, then go to the /Users/user name/Library/Preferences folder. Look for a file called com.apple.Bluetooth.plist and trash it.The OS will create a new preference file when you enable Bluetooth again.

Cheers! DALE

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Answer 3

Nov 3, 2007 2:36 AM in response to gordon142

I did a few things:

1. some sort of reset some ram/rom thing (shut down, unplug, remove battery, hold power button down for 5 seconds, put back together and restart)

2. deleted plist file as suggested above

3. unchecked System Preferences->Bluetooth->"Discoverable"

Very unscientific, I know, but I'll kick the machine around for a while and see if anything changes and report back. It is always difficult to reproduce this issue anyway. If the problem is resolved, it won't isolate the issue but at least will narrow it down.

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