I am having spontaneous logouts while I am in Snow Leopard. This is happening a couple times a day and it is very annoying. When it logs out it instantly goes to a blue screen and then the login screen appears. When I log back in all my apps have quit and it is like I am logging in for the first time. I did have this happen in Leopard too, but very rarely.
Here are some facts that may help:
MacBookPro5,1
Bluetooth on : apple mouse, keyboard
Network, wired ethernet
Connected to external monitor via mini display port.
All software patches up to date.
Anybody else experience this problem? Any suggestions.
I'm having the same problem -- spontaneous leap to blue screen, returning to desktop with no open apps. Has happened 3x total since moving to 10.6, 2 of them before upgrading to 10.6.1 and 1 since. MacBookPro early 2008; no peripherals, no Excel so I doubt it's related to those. I did install Rosetta. Can't recall the exact circumstances each time since I did not note them but will try to in future.
This happens very reliably for me in Photoshop CS(1) which apparently runs in Rosetta. It doesn't seem to be any specific action, in fact I can do something (like re-run a filter) repeatedly and after a while, it'll just die. According to the syslog, it's a segmentation fault, and while it recovers better than the old days of segfaults, it still kills all running applications which is inconvenient to say the least. And while big crashes in the past used to say "your computer crashed and had to be restarted, do you want to report this to apple?" it acts like nothing happened in these cases. It's really frustrating. Luckily I don't use Photoshop for my job, but I do use it enough that it's really bad that it doesn't work and I don't have the money to upgrade right now.
Installed Snow Leopard at 2pm. Worked in Excel at 3PM. Spontaneous logout 3 times within 30 minutes. Never EVER had this problem until an hour after I installed Snow Leopard. It's Snow Leopard and Apple needs to fix it NOW!
It's definitely related to snow leopard. There is always a risk of problems in major upgrades like this, and while I didn't have problems where I feared I would (3rd party wifi USB adapter due to airport card problems), I've run into them elsewhere (Photoshop CS).
I had a spontaneous segfault yesterday at work. The kind that darkens the screen and gives the message. It's the first I've had since the SL upgrade. I thought the spontaneous logout was a segfault (the log messages seemed to indicate such) and it was just better at recovering from it. I've gone through all my library folders and weeded out old software bits as best I can. I do have a MS corded keyboard and bluetooth mouse that I use at work with the drivers. If that's the cause, it was a week and a half before it showed up. I think I was just saving a file in BBEdit when it happened... I'm primarily a programmer. I use open office, not MS office. I've been able to use Photoshop for short periods, quitting the application after and reloading it if needed. But I always fear that I'll lose my work so don't spend the time on it that I would have. Adobe reports a potential crash when saving files from any of their products so saving often isn't necessarily a good way to avoid problems.
While restarts are ok, I have trouble logging out of one account and getting the login window back. I use a file vault account at work and logout at the end of the day. For the first few days, I just got the light blue background or the desktop photo but no login window. The machine would sleep just fine and wakeup to that state. I found in syslog that it was reporting a problem writing to a crashlog so I deleted the old logs and that improved the problem. Now it just takes several minutes to come up... several minutes past the usual "recovering disk space" etc... I don't have a backup drive at work so it's not that. I backup at home since it won't backup filevault accounts while logged into them (always been a problem.)
I don't know... in some ways, SL is better. But when I installed 10.5.8, my laptop had been up without a restart for 47 days in a row which is the kind of stability I've come to expect. Lately, I've been restarting as much as I was with the Dell laptop work gave me to use.
Same spontaneous logout issue here. MacBook Pro 13" running Snow Leopard 10.6 Rosetta for Microsoft Excel 2004. Using Bluetooth mouse and keyboard. External Samsung monitor.
Logout occurred while using Excel, not sure if I was typing or using a key command. Went immediately to blue screen and logout. Luckily the auto recover file saved most of my work.
Actually I had this very issue with the office update of 11.5.5 and the update to 10.5.8. Crashed and trashed two 1TB drives (which I had to get external drives to recover the data). I still need to somehow recover the drives as disk utility can't recover them.
So I'd say it's the M$ 'update' it also affects the keyboard while in excel (I can't always get keystrokes to show up in a cell). So I'm not sure I'd blame it all on SL.
That might be more effective than posting in these forums.
And FWIW, I'm convinced it's a keypress/Rosetta interaction. I've gotten logged out just from typing in a Rosetta-run program. Sometimes even just hitting the return key will do it, or typing in mid-sentence.
I am also convinced it is the keypress/Rosetta interaction. I was the original poster and have been trying to piece this together. The Office software is not an issue for me. However, running Eudora, Meeting maker and other Rosetta apps and typing, hitting return, etc always seems to be the commmon thread for the logout. Since the 10.6.1 upgrade I have not encountered this problem.
I had the same problems, but after deleting every bluetooth device except for my older wireless apple keyboard, things have settled down. i haven't had a single sudden blue screen and logout in two days now. I am going to try adding back devices to see if a particular one was causing it. I had purchased one of the new style bluetooth Apple keyboards, and every blue screen occurred while typing on it...so my guess is that restarting it will bring about the problem again....we'll see....hopefully Apple will figure out the reason and issue an update....
Don't know if this will help but for those having problems with Excel 2004 try copying each sheet of the problem workbook (mainly one file for me) to a brand new workbook and save it. Then use this instead of the old file. I did this and have had big improvement. I don't know why exactly (that's for wiser people than me), but worth a try. For everyone else I don't know if you can copy the information into a new file and save it but would be interested to hear if it works. Good luck.
