Frozen battery timer and clock

Here's some things to try:
1) log out and back in
2) restart the computer and see if it behaves after a restart
3) work in another user account and see if the same behavior shows up.

~Lyssa

I'm having the same problem. I first noticed when the time was incorrect. I get the rainbow beachball of doom whenever I mouse over Time Machine/Spaces/Volume/Airport/clock icons in the upper right, yet Spotlight is accessable. Rebooting/Loging off only temporarily fixes the problem.

bugbiteme:

How large of a hard drive do you have? How much free space is available?

How much RAM does your computer have?

If you have plenty of free hard drive space (more than 15% of the total size), create a new user account, log out of the current account and into the new one. Does the issue persist here?

~Lyssa

HDD
U - 500GB
F - 72GB

RAM
4GB

I'm sure it would start to work if I created a new account, but I don't want to go down that rout.

I'll let you all know if I figure out what is causing the problem.

Also, it seems to have unhung on its own. There must be a process or service causing it to hang.

I was able to figure out the cause and solve this issue on my end.

I opened Activity Monitor and saw "SystemUIServer (Not Responding)", so I looked up process:

http://guides.macrumors.com/SystemUIServer

Apparently, SystemUIServer manages the 'menu extras' on the upper right-hand side of the menu bar. There was also this other useful tidbit of information:

"A bad hardware state may cause the SystemUIServer to hang. Often, unplugging the external device will unhang the SystemUIServer"

"The SystemUIServer is owned by the logged in user (as opposed to root) and automatically restarts if it crashes or is force quit."

I had recently started using on of my older iPods again, so I guessed that maybe it was the device in a "bad hardware state", so I unplugged iPod (super old 3rd gen 15 gig...formatted originally on Windows...back when I was a PC)

Right away the SystemUIServer process unfroze in Activity Monitor and the upper right hand menue items are no longer hanging.

So my advice to others with this problem is to unplug devices from USB (iPod, etc...) and see if it eventually unfreezes.

I've seen iPods hang Mac OS during bootup as well, but this is a new one for me.

I should probably add that my iPod causing the hang was plugged in to the FireWire port.

Had the exact same solution with mine... 3rd gen 15GB iPod plugged in with firewire to my mac froze the clock. Didn't even consider that an Apple product could hang it up. So much for backward compatibility.