UserEventAgent not responding.

Yep, getting the EXACT same thing. Can anyone shed light on this??

Regards,

Pete

I'm also getting this on a MacBook Pro 2.16 and on a G5 Dual 2Ghz after upgrading to 10.5.

This process is killing me. Its pulling 100% usage on one of my cores, and is making the system very sluggish. I also cant shut down the computer, it hangs with the wallpaper up (prolly trying to quit this process). The one time I tried to quit the process it gave me a beachball that never went away.

I did a reinstall, and still have the same problem. Both installs were clean, and nothing else is installed on my computer besides the Lep CD.

I am on the phone with Apple now, but they have not heard of this problem so far.

Well Michael's experience rules this out as an upgrade issue - two clean installs and its still happening.

The CPU usage is very bad for me too, sometimes 90 - 100% with no apps open. I am able to force quite the process when its not responding, but not long after it will crash again.

I havent had it give a "not responding" message, it just runs and runs at 100% for me.

I am still on the phone with Apple, and this rep said its the spotlight indexing feature, even though my spotlight doesnt show that its indexing.

I just started seeing this after installing the "Login & Keychain Update 1.0" software update. UserEventAgent is consuming 100% CPU, won't respond to Quit or Force Quit commands.

This seems to have solved it for me, though I can't say how safe this is. I ran the following commands from Terminal:

launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.UserEventAgent-Aqua.plist
sudo unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.UserEventAgent-Aqua.plist

(I ran it the second time as root because the first invocation gave an error, about not having permission; the second one also gave a different error, about not having anything to unload. My guess is that the second command disabled UserEventAgent).

Anyway, UserEventAgent is now not running after reboot, and there isn't any noticeable problems with the system.

My guess is that to enable this process again, I need to do:

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.UserEventAgent-Aqua.plist

And again, as disclaimer, I have no idea if this is safe or not.

Message was edited by: casey.marshall (removed mistaken quotation of parent)

Just an update that we no longer think its a spotlight issue, he is looking into other things.

Neither command worked for me, it said there was nothing to unload.

Michael Wertz1 wrote:
Neither command worked for me, it said there was nothing to unload.

Thats what is supposed to happen, according to the first user to run the commands, it disabled the process, disabling the unload capability of the event.

It should be working for you.

Exactly. 'launchctl unload -w' (note the -w) also modifies the launchd plist file to make sure it isn't loaded when launchd starts running. root won't have this running, because root isn't logged in, so there isn't anything to unload. You need to reboot (or log out/log in, maybe) to see it work.

Yep, I am an idiot. I forgot to restart. After a restart its gone, and things are working smoothly so far.

We have any idea what this process does yet?

And thanks for the help, I was about to to back to Tiger the performance was so awful.

I would try this command, but I'm a little hesitant before I know what it actually does - can anyone shed any light? Many thanks.

From the UserEventAgent man page:

The UserEventAgent utility is responsible for loading plugins that provide for system response to user-generated events.

That's pretty cryptic, and the plugins it loads (from /System/Library/UserEventPlugins) are:

AirPortUserAgent.plugin
AppleHIDMouseAgent.plugin
BTMMPortInUseAgent.plugin
BluetoothUserAgent-Plugin.plugin
InstrumentsHotKeyAgent.plugin
ParentalControlsUEAPlugin.plugin
alfUIplugin.plugin
iCalAlarmAgent.plugin

I don't suppose this is helpful in answering the "do I need this?" question.