Liz S wrote:
I have the latest versions of Launchbar and Bartender installed which I have managed to disable in case these are in someway involved/causing the problem.
Launcher and Bartender (especially Bartender) are prime suspects here, in my view. They could be conflicting with each other, or with something else you have installed. They both claim to be compatible with Monterey, but the totality of everything you have installed determines how apps may conflict with one another (or with the MacOS itself). I would start by completely UNINSTALLING those two. See if the problem goes away. I think there is a decent chance it will go away.
Booting into Safe Mode is also a harmless and useful diagnostic, as that disables most extensions. But they remain installed, so the problem could reoccur even in Safe Mode.
Disabling those apps is not enough, they remain installed with hooks in place. You could also download and run Etrecheck which may reveal other issues, it is a diagnostic only app, which can be run in free mode (paid version adds extra features). Export the Etrecheck report and post it here using the Additional text button below.
There is another brute force approach (I would try the above suggestions first) that will resolve your problem: you have already reinstalled Monterey via Recovery, which is the right thing to do, but you then kept or migrated in all your old stuff, no doubt bringing over the problem again. A better test would be to restore your Mac to factory settings; this means erase the disk, so you must have at least one, preferably two good verified backups, and reinstall the MacOS from scratch: follow Apple's instructions
Erase your Mac and reset it to factory settings - Apple Support
reinstall Monterey from Recovery, then on first boot up create only a new administrator user, call it ADMIN, and then continue. You now have a vanilla plain Mac system, see if the issue is gone (it will be). Then migrate over from your backup only user files and accounts, no applications or settings. This will restore your original user account(s) but no software, apps, tools aside from the ones Apple provides with new Macs. I expect the problem will be gone. Then install your applications one or two at a time to see when the problem resurfaces, and that will be your answer. You need to of course have a good, reliable backups for this, so you don't lose anything in the process.
