Mail & Safari "take a break"
I've had the following symptoms occurring for years, and there must be some solution for it.
THE SYMPTOMS
1) When opening a new message in Mail, the header info is persented, but the body remains blank. All other aspects of Mail appear to be working during this freeze, such as downloading new messages and showing them in the inbox.
2) At the same time, if I try to open a new (uncached) webpage on Safari, the browser scroll bar will start to move to the right, but it stops at about the 10 - 15% point and the main browser window remains blank. A cached page will display like there is no issue.
3) Again, at the same time, when I click-to-open a recipe in Paprika, an App Store recipe database, it behaves exactly like Mail does, where the headers are presented, but the body of the recipe remains blank.
4) Also, while in this state, if I click on the About tab in the System Settings, it remains blank until the situation clears.
While experiencing these issues, it seems that all of my other apps are working as expected. If I wait long enough, and it is a very random amount of time, all of these issues clear at the same time, and the above apps begin to work normally. Other than waiting for these apps to "return from their break," I need to either relaunch the Finder or restart the computer to clear the issue. When doing either, it takes an inordinately long time to relaunch or restart.
This issue occurs on two laptops, in different S/W configuration. They are both new M2 machines running macOS 13.3.1, and one was initialized without the system configurations, when provided that choice during the startup from Time Machine. They both behave the same, though.
WHAT WAS DONE TO TROUBLESHOOT/FIX THE PROBLEM
a) I started both machines in Safe Mode, and the problem persisted. Interestingly, I noticed a background app running in Safe Mode, which should not have happened. I remove it form the Library folders.
b) I uninstalled all S/W that would be running in the background (e.g., Bitdefender, CleanMyMac, iStat Menus, etc), first on one machine, then on the other. I also removed the related single- and multi-user Library files to the trash, when I uninstalled these apps. This effort made no difference in operation.
c) I followed instructions to reinitialize Safari and Mail by removing the prefs files, etc, with no change in behavior. I also uninstalled all ad blockers and anti-trackers in Safari on both machines to have no impact on the problem.
d) I ran Onyx maintenance scripts on both machines to have no change in the issue.
e) I contacted an Apple Genius, who ran through some checklist, then referred me to Senior Support. That person was no help, because I had already tried everything that they had to recommend.
f) I found an older, closed posting here that described exactly what I am experiencing, and the recommendation was to run EtreCheck, but that app found no issues or weird adware.
g) I almost forgot to say that during this condition, there is absolutely no unusual activity in CPU or memory usage. If I wait long enough for the issue to clear, the Activity Monitor has no subsantial changes to any of the top processes.
SUMMARY
I think that I am at wits end at this point. I am about to manually load all docs, bookmarks, etc onto an external drive and wipe one of the machines, prior to a clean OS install without using a Time Machine backup. I am at the point of suspecting old-old system files from 2012 and earlier that have been reloaded and reloaded each time I updated my computers. Although I did go through and try to delete those old files, no change occurred in behavior, other than the frequency of the "breaktimes" for these apps decreased a bit.
Anybody have any good ideas? It would have take much less time to do a full clean install, but I fear that the issue might not go away.
MacBook Pro 16″
