OS X Lion freezes at login screen + App Store is slow

I installed OS X Lion in my Mac Book Pro (Mid 2010) and have two issues:


- Login screen freezes sometimes. "Colored rotating disc" appears, text cursor stops blinking and I can not do anything; I can not click anywere, I can not enter my user name/password... Only option is to hard-reboot the computer, which is not a pleasant thing to do.


- App Store is very slow. It takes about 30 seconds of "rotating colored disc thinking" every time a page has to be loaded!


I first installed OS X Lion via Mac App Store and login screen freezes happened about 50% or more of the times I turned on the computer! Also random freezes happened during computer work. Computer was almost unusable under these circumstances, so I reinstalled OS X Lion by doing a clean install (from DVD). After this clean install everithing seemed to run smoothly at first, but now login screen freezes happen again and Mac App Store is very slow as I explained.


I did not have any of these problems with Snow Leopard. I have checked permissions, and I have not installed too many apps yet.


Anybody with these same issues? Any idea of a solution? Somebody at Apple working to solve these problems?


Thanks!

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7)

Posted on Jul 25, 2011 3:47 AM

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1,019 replies

Aug 2, 2011 10:24 AM in response to jmacbookpro

Well im done, i have no choice now to go back to Snow Leapord.


My Macbook Pro 2010 15 inch i7 will not let me log in anymore. it just beach balls non stop. No matter what i do with Pram reset, Boot up with the option + R to be able to repair permissions and disk, i can not log into my Macbook Pro.


Its just dead now it seems at log in, Apple support was no help over the phone for the first time in years. Since its out of warranty i am just installing a new HD and going back to SL. This ***** since i need this macbook up and running asap.


Sad too cause my Mac Pro 2008 has no issues at log in and no issues like my Macbook Pro has even when i was able to log in.

Aug 5, 2011 3:58 AM in response to johnfrombrussels

johnfrombrussels wrote:


I had the same problem (not able to log in, beach ball keeps on spinning, even after hard reboot). This was solved (at least temporarily) by resetting the SMC, see article http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3964.


I am sorry, but resetting SMC did not solve the problem for me. Only deactivation of AGS worked for me. Waiting for a patch from Apple...

Aug 6, 2011 9:28 AM in response to jmacbookpro

Just do a clean installation of Lion, i have done it myself and it works like a charm now everything is smooth just one advice, after you enter for the first time to the system give it a couple of hours where it could may be warm because the HDD is getting indexed, but then it will all come to normal and there is no heat and youtube is working really nice no heat or fan noises, if you don't know how to do a clean installation of lion here is the link with the instructions [url]http://eggfreckles.net/tech/installing-lion-clean/[/url]



hope this works for you



P.S. remember to do a time machine backup to recover al your apps and data

Aug 6, 2011 11:00 AM in response to SalvadorG

Thanks for trying to help, but this thread was started because of issues on a "clean install" of Lion (please, read initial post).


SalvadorG wrote:


Just do a clean installation of Lion, i have done it myself and it works like a charm now everything is smooth just one advice, after you enter for the first time to the system give it a couple of hours where it could may be warm because the HDD is getting indexed, but then it will all come to normal and there is no heat and youtube is working really nice no heat or fan noises, if you don't know how to do a clean installation of lion here is the link with the instructions [url]http://eggfreckles.net/tech/installing-lion-clean/[/url]



hope this works for you



P.S. remember to do a time machine backup to recover al your apps and data

Aug 7, 2011 11:46 AM in response to jmacbookpro

I too had the Lion Login freeze problem on a 2010 15" MBP.


At first I did an upgrade from snow leopard, and was noticing the login freeze after every 2 or 3 shutdowns.

I also upgraded a 2009 20" iMac, with no problems.


I decided to do a clean install and so I downloaded the Lion installer to my work 13" 2011 MBP, burned the .DMG file to a bootable DVD then used that and disk util to do a clean install on the 15" MBP.


The clean install was worse than the upgrade - the freeze came everytime and I had to force a shutdown. But, I found that if I logged in really quick, I could beat the freeze before the cursor stopped blinking and the beach ball showed up. I have about 3 seconds to login before the freeze. After logging in I came here, and then disabled the automatic graphics card switching and haven't had a problem since. I don't play games or use any software that would need the nvidia card, but I have no idea if this really is affecting the login screen.


For those of you that are still stuck, or are experiencing occasional login screen freezes, have you considered getting rid of the login screen? By that I mean going into system preferences, security and setting up an auto login account. It's disabled by default


Try the quick login trick, it worked for me. I thought I'd bricked my mbp until I noticed the cursor in the login password field stops blinking after 3 or 4 seconds.


-nick

Aug 7, 2011 3:02 PM in response to nxspam

Well I did try to disable the automatic graphic switching on my MacBook Pro about a week ago and so far I haven't had any more freezing at the login screen, so I guess this can be the temporary solution.


For me, the shorten battery life is not a problem as I use my MBP as my main computer at home only and use my MBA on the road.


From this thread, this seems to be only a problem for the MBP and hopefully Apple will issue a patch very soon.

Aug 8, 2011 7:46 AM in response to jmacbookpro

I have a mac-mini-server and have the same problem. Freeze and Spinning Ball at login screen every 3rd or so time. Can still login using ssh and everythings else seems to still run, just can't login through UI. Also, the mac-mini-server has no "graphics switching" option in Energy Saver settings, so this does not help here.


This was done on a clean install without any account or system transfers. Apple, please fix ASAP.


Toffimeister

Aug 8, 2011 12:12 PM in response to jmacbookpro

I had this same spinning ball at login when I tried to do anything after the desktop displayed. It did not seem consistant but I eventually hit upon the relationship with the times I unticked the open wndows checkbox in the shutdown dialogue and the spinning ball. I found that if I unticked the checkbox, Lion froze. If I left it checked Lion started and opened my eyeTV app.

Now, I have MySQL installed and the autostart feature does not work because of permissions. Since I don't want it to start every time, I was happy to get the message at start-up telling my that MySQL has not been started due to lack of permission. I just clicked OK and it went away.

I thought that this message box might be conflicting with the lion code that was stopping things from starting. So I tracked down the MySQL start up string and moved it out of the StartUpItems folder (/Library/StartUpItems...). Problem solved.

Apple probably needs to test this to verify but it might help identify problem areas for users.

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OS X Lion freezes at login screen + App Store is slow

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