Strange Minimize Button behavior

Question

Strange Minimize Button behavior

Not a terribly urgent issue, but one little annoyance - after using an application for a while, the minimize button on a window will become greyed out and unusable. The menu option to minimize remains enabled, but does nothing if selected. Mainly, I have noticed this occurring in Safari and in GarageBand - the quick fix in Safari is to just open a new window, and the minimize button is yellow again, but in GarageBand I have to restart the app entirely (which is not very fast, especially when working with some of those Jam Pack 4 instruments.)

Just curious to see if anyone else has seen this issue. Other than this, haven't had any problems with Leopard at all. Runs faster than Tiger did, somehow.

15" MB, 2Ghz Core Duo, Mac OS X (10.5.1), 2GB RAM, 80GB and 120GB ext

Posted on Dec 2, 2007 2:50 PM

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Answer 1

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Dec 3, 2007 2:28 AM in response to upbeatpenguin

I usually have gottten that exact same problem when I use Safari for a extended period of time. Just recently I noticed it has been doing it with the finder. That I usually solve by force quit and relaunch finder. It again I noticed it isnt anything major but quite a annoyance.

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Answer 2

Dec 3, 2007 3:23 AM in response to upbeatpenguin

This is an old issue that began with one of the early versions of 10.4 a couple of years ago. I had it happen for a while about a year ago or so and was never able to track down its cause, even with all the great help out here. Generally quitting the applications solved it for a while as you have found. It just went away in my case and I really have no clue as to what caused it, or why it quit.

Sorry that I can't offer any more than that. I wish I knew what to do to help you solve the issue.

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Answer 3

Dec 12, 2007 9:55 AM in response to Al Van Malsen

Yeah having the same problem here, using 10.4.11.

In Mail.app the button is greyed out but in Safari the button is yellow but will not respond to clicks at all. Have seen react the same way in a few more apps as well.

Tried clearing caches, running various maintenance scripts with MainMenu but no go, the behaviour comes back soon after the restart. Will have to monitor this situation. It's pretty annoying.

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Answer 4

Dec 17, 2007 5:45 PM in response to Diane Benoît

running 10.5.1 ... same issue here ... Safari, Yahoo IM. Annoying.

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Answer 5

Jan 16, 2008 9:48 AM in response to upbeatpenguin

We are seeing the same issue but with MS Word. It seems to crop up when we minimize a document, close the lid (going to the next office) and when you open the laptop, the yellow dot is gray. Quit word and start back up makes it come back, but often is the case where we have multiple documents open so quitting is an annoyance.

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Answer 6

Feb 17, 2008 11:29 AM in response to Mac Scott

Well I found out a few weeks ago this bug happened when I played a game in full-screen mode. I scanned a few Mac forums for this problem and some think it might be a combination of some code in OS X and OpenGL or something.

Like in this forum here :

( http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=96598)

the user sees this behaviour happen after he uses VMware Fusion in full-screen mode.

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