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

I am having the same problem with my MBP 15" Core i5 2.4 Ghz.  It locks up at login every 3-4 booth and I get the spinning beach ball. Judging by this thread, it is pretty common and hopefully Aple will issue a patch soon.  I have a 11" MBA that does not have that problem by the way.

same problem with my MBP. 15" Core i5 2.4G, 4G RAM, 2010 Sep. It happened 2/3 when I login the system. Same beach ball, hard power off the MBP and powen on again.

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.

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.

Resetting SMC helped on my MBP 2010 i5!

Yesterday i resetted SMC. Now everything works fine! Logging in, Logging of and fast user switch are really fast now, even if power cord is plugged in. It also doesnt matter if AGS is activated or not - everything is okay now!

I uninstall a safari plugin called Lastpass and mine runs like it did in SL, no more problems at all.

This is an intensive plugin that does not know how to deal with Lion's newer security algorithms, thus kind of freaks out.

I will get it again someday when all the bugs are out, but until them, I will just have to remember my passwords some other way.

For me the resetting of the SMC didn't solve the problem.

But it looks like deactivation of the AGS helped me too.

i have the identical problem, except, makes no difference whether i am on battery or power. we need to find a fix for this.

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

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

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.

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

The same spinning beachball here, at login: this makes Lion (upgrade from App Store) unusable!!! Steve, where are you?!?!

Disabling AGS does not help! I use Lion WDE on my MB Pro 15" (mid 2010)... This is very sad...