Expose/Shortcuts Not working

My short cut is also not working, not running screen savers, not doing anything I wasn't before, and now the keyboard shortcut keeps disappearing even after I reset it, and when I go to spotlight preferences, after I hit the icon once, it says loading, and I have to hit it again to load it. None of the other options do this. Very annoying. Restart doesn't help, putting it to sleep.. nothing.

Any ideas?

Usually if Exposé or the screen saver stops working, or if a Dashboard application stops responding, you can get it working again by restarting the Dock. Start the Terminal application (in /Applications/Utilities). When a terminal window comes up, click in it and type "killall Dock" without the quotes, and press return. This will stop the Dock application, which will automatically restart.

I figured it out... It dawned on me that maybe the shortcut ability was turned off in the keyboard/mouse menu, and it was. So that's why it was never taking in the spotlight menu.

It's still stalling on the spotlight menu, but, that I can live with. The shortcut was my biggest concern just because I've gotten so used to it.

Thanks @edclange - yes I was experiencing a similar issue (only started to happen recently) Killing and restarting the dock fixed it. Note folks that "Dock" is case sensitive too.

I am also having the same issue happened once last week and after a restart it was ok then today has done it constantly, spotlight, expose, spaces hot keys will cease to function. After log out/log in, restart, or putting into sleep and bringing out, it corrects issue for short time but will reoccur.

Restarting dock and or finder will not correct this issue nor would disabling Dashboard. I have however just started using a screensaver the last couple days instead of having display just sleep and am starting to believe this could be the issue due to the timing of problem I have currently turned Screen Saver off again (was using system album art SS) and will keep you updated with what happens but has been a couple hours with no issue.

Look forward to a solution or at least a cause...

The killall Dock trick didn't work for me, but putting my Macbook to sleep and waking it up did work. Not sure how each activity restarts the Dock app differently, but there must be something different.

I've been using the iTunes Artwork screensaver from Apple, so it's not exclusively a 3rd party screensaver issue.

I have been leaving my Adobe Air Twitter client running overnight, however, and this problem always presents itself in the morning when I sit down again.

According to search results here and elsewhere, this has been happening in Leopard over multiple versions for more than a year. Time for a fix!!!

I have the latest iMac 2.66GHz and I too had the same problem of Expose not working after what seemed to be a random interval. Putting it to sleep and back on again did fix it but that process was annoying. I read that the cause was either due to certain screen savers or having a second display being connected to my iMac.

I've only ever used the screensavers that shipped with OSX and yet encountered this Expose problem so instead of trying different screen savers, I simply disabled the screensaver on my second monitor, and let it activate normally on my primary iMac screen. I've never had Expose failing since then and it's been over 3 weeks now. It used to fail at least once a day.

Hope this helps somebody!

Just to update after turning off screen saver (itunes artwork) have not had the problem, not sure how problem started but glad to have found out what was causing it. Hope there is a fix soon.

try to kill the Screensaver process instead. It worked for me. Hope this helps

My Expose stopped working today, and itz annoying as I use it a lot to see my other windows and spaces. Tried the killall Dock, and the dock did reboot, but, did not help Expose, same issue. I fully reninstalled my OS 10.5 last week, have no add on screen savers or utilities or anti virus. How can I trash the expose plist, can not find in the prefs folder??

i got the same problem… in my case it was the screensaver.

Flash-based screensavers seem to trigger this behaviour on my machine. It was PolarClock specifically on my machine, but I saw the same problem with other Adobe Flash-based screen savers.

The issue has come back today, and worse than ever. I used the killall dock command, that did not work right away, after rebooting several times, my expose started working again. Today, i get up, and expose is broken again, so is magnification on the dock and the dock icons telling me their app name. I use only the apple screen savers and background, have used the killall dock command again and rebooted, and still the issue persists. Can I use time machine on some folder and undue whatever got corrupted, does anyone at apple have a fix for this problem?

Thanks for the advise everyone. Here is the result and solution after sitting at the Genius bar; and I have to say, I know better, I should have done this before hauling my iMac 15 miles to the Genius bar.

The issue come down to a perif device taking up my processor time, preventing the instant items from working, like Expose, the dock magnification and dock icon names, popups in Netflix; all were suspended processes while the perif device held up both of my processors.

I have three perifs, a Cannon printer-installed a month ago, a fantom 500gb hard drive used with time machine and installed 5 months ago, and a logitech wireless mouse, all through a USB hub. This issue started about a month ago, can you guess which one is the problem? So, I love my Cannon, it is my second one, I came home, unplugged the USB cable to it, rebooted, and the issue has stopped. The genius bar said they had heard of one different printer causing such an issue, and he explained the bundles and all to me so that I would understand, but, this is NOT a usual event. I noticed yesterday, there is an update to my Cannon print driver bundle, i installed it, but, have not dared to plug the USB cable back in. I will only when I need to print. Like I said, I know better, and should have tested my perifs long before going to the apple store, I will blame my failure on old age, ;

I have the same problem as listed above, but I didn't have any perifs plugged in when the error occurred so I refuse to believe that this is the problem. On top of that, my screen saver hasn't been activated between the time when Exposé worked correctly, and when it stopped working.

Possible sources of the problem:
1) Multiple people have mentioned Adobe Air as being a possible source to this problem. I have Seesmic Desktop running pretty much non stop on my machine, but haven't noticed this as being a source for this problem.
2) I watched a movie last night with VLC in full screen mode. I've noticed that using fullscreen mode in any video viewer is often a precursor to this problem.
3) I can often duplicate this problem by putting the screen to sleep (via a hotcorner) and then quickly moving the mouse to wake the screen up again.

2) and 3) seem the most probable to me as sources for this problem, though I realize that sometimes other softwares interaction cause a 'perfect storm' for errors. (Once a VPN client and Parallels interacted in startup and hosed my computer, but I digress.)

I haven't tried the killall Dock solution, but putting the computer completely to sleep corrected the problem for me. Considering this has been an intermittent problem throughout many releases of OSX, and a source of annoyance to many, I feel like Apple needs to find and squash this bug.