Why do my open windows disappear when opening mission control?

Question

Level 1

4 points

Why do my open windows disappear when opening mission control?

When using mission control, my windows all shrink to a dot making it impossible to actually select a window (which is the whole point of using mission control in the first place).

I'm on Monterey (12.0) but it looks like this problem has occurred on multiple versions and there's no evidence it has ever been fixed (e.g. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8296956)

This only effects my main screen. The problem doesn't exist for any external monitors for example, that are not the main screen.

MacBook Pro 14″, macOS 12.0

Posted on Jan 17, 2022 9:46 AM

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Answer 1

Jan 19, 2022 10:30 AM in response to zaksmith86

I have no idea why this is happening for you, but I can assure you that it is not what most users experience.

I can only recommend the usual:

1) Restart in Safe Mode, and test. Most likely, the problem will not be present in Safe Mode, indicating that some third party software modification is likely the problem.

2) Run Etrecheck and post its full report here, so we can know which software modifications there are and hopefully figure out which is causing this.

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Answer 2

zaksmith86 Author

Level 1

4 points

Jan 19, 2022 12:34 PM in response to Luis Sequeira1

Thanks - running in safe mode removed the issue so i'm going to load apps one-by-one to try to locate the problem, and resort to Etrecheck only if required.

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Answer 3

Barney-15E

Level 10

121,904 points

Jan 17, 2022 5:30 PM in response to zaksmith86

No idea, but have you tried closing windows one-at-a-time to see if one of them is causing the behavior. I don't know why one window would do that, but it's the only thing I can think of to troubleshoot.

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