Volume Keeps Muting Itself / Strange Behaviours

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Level 1

8 points

Volume Keeps Muting Itself / Strange Behaviours

Hey,

For the past couple of months my Macbook has been doing some strange things, one (and most annoyingly) of these things is that the volume keeps muting itself.

My macbook has started to hang quite often as well, and everytime it hangs, the volume mutes.

Also, when I begin to play a video either from hard drive or DVD, there will be no sound (even if the volume control is unmuted) for about 20 seconds, and the video will keep freezing and hanging for anything from 30 seconds to a few minutes.

Two days ago, in an effort to fix this problem I reinstalled OS X (using the archive and install option - as I didn't want to have to reinstall and recover everything) and for these two days it was working beautifully, and since last night (when I reinstalled Pro Tools LE 8 because for some reason my Mbox wasn't connecting) it has been playing up again.

Before reinstalling the OS I had looked around on forums and support pages to try and find answers or solutions, there were posts from this saying that defragging was the way forward, so I purchased iDefrag and it defragmented my highly fragmented hard drive, but it didn't solve it. Then I read that strange behaviour and lessened performance can be caused by a lack of HDD space (I had 16GB left out of a 160GB HDD) so I upgraded to a 320GB HDD - still no luck.

Has anyone got any clues as to why this is happening?

Thanks
Lee

Macbook (White 13"), Mac OS X (10.5.8), Intel 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo / 3GB RAM

Posted on Dec 10, 2009 10:59 AM

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Answer 1

Dec 11, 2009 9:30 PM in response to leehfp

HI,

Try resetting the PRAM, instructions here.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379

If that doesn't help...

Run the Apple Hardware Test.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2684

Carolyn 🙂

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Answer 2

leehfp Author

Level 1

8 points

Dec 11, 2009 12:29 PM in response to sig

Thanks for replying! Yeah I just gave that a go, but hasn't made a difference unfortunately.

I tried reinstalling the OS again yesterday, and today about an hour ago the volume problem has returned. So it would seem that the reinstallation of pro tools didn't cause the problem to return last time.

The problem has also changed now from automatically muting to automatically taking the volume to 95%.

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Answer 3

leehfp Author

Level 1

8 points

Dec 14, 2009 1:31 PM in response to leehfp

Hey,

Just to let you know, I think I just solved my problem.

Basically, when I signed up to Natwest Online Banking, they suggested to me to download a piece of software called Rapport Security. It was free, and downloadable from Natwest's website.

And it seems to be this terribly engineered piece of software that has been causing ALL my problems.

I noticed in my activity monitor that Rapport wasn't responding - I'd noticed this before but have always put off uninstalling it for some reason, and the thought never crossed my mind that it was Rapport causing the issues.

I decided to uninstall it this evening and there wasn't a straight forward way of doing it, so I researched (googled) it and apparently this software has caused Mac users problems strange problems before.

After uninstalling it, my macbook was almost miraculously back to normal! No more volume problems, no system hangs...so far anyway. Although I'm confident that this has now been solved, if the problem returns I'll let you know.

To uninstall Rapport, you need to go to your Library folder and find the Rapport folder.

In there is a file called RapportUninstaller.sh this is a shell file, and if you open the file with Terminal, the unistaller will run and Rapport will be gone banished from your system!

Lee

Message was edited by: leehfp

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Answer 4

leehfp Author

Level 1

8 points

Dec 14, 2009 1:32 PM in response to leehfp

Basically, when I signed up to Natwest Online Banking, they suggested to me to download a piece of software called Rapport Security. It was free, and downloadable from Natwest's website.

And it seems to be this terribly engineered piece of software that has been causing ALL my problems.

I noticed in my activity monitor that Rapport wasn't responding - I'd noticed this before but have always put off uninstalling it for some reason, and the thought never crossed my mind that it was Rapport causing the issues.

I decided to uninstall it this evening and there wasn't a straight forward way of doing it, so I researched (googled) it and apparently this software has caused Mac users problems strange problems before.

After uninstalling it, my macbook was almost miraculously back to normal! No more volume problems, no system hangs...so far anyway. Although I'm confident that this has now been solved, if the problem returns I'll let you know.

To uninstall Rapport, you need to go to your Library folder and find the Rapport folder.

In there is a file called RapportUninstaller.sh this is a shell file, and if you open the file with Terminal, the unistaller will run and Rapport will be gone banished from your system!

Hope this helps you! Good luck!

Lee

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Answer 5

sig

Level 8

35,862 points

Dec 10, 2009 1:23 PM in response to leehfp

Have you booted from your OS installer disk and run Repair Disk from Disk Utility?

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Answer 6

leehfp Author

Level 1

8 points

Dec 12, 2009 9:40 AM in response to Carolyn Samit

Hey Carolyn,

Thanks for your reply, I'd already tried resetting the PRAM, and it didn't make a difference, and when I ran the hardware test it didn't show any problems.

Lee

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