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

Also works for me

MacMini mid 2010

Hmm,

  For anyone who's had a motherboard replaced, does your MacBook pro still show as a 6,2?

  If its turning out to be a defective kext, I wonder I'd the mb replacement's are being seen differently by the kext?

@Metalizer et al.: Answer - Removing the entire extension from my MBP6,2 System/Extensions folder works. But replacing its "... /Contents/info.plist" with the one from my MacBookPro8,3 (brand-new 17" MBP with OEM Lion installed) does not work! I got the SBBoD as soon as I turned AGS ON and tried to reboot.

Reverting to simply removing the AGPM.kext file and leaving it in the trash has worked so far. WIll let the thread know if it freezes again.

My local Apple Certified Tech said (today) that (without the AGPM.kext file) in the worst case, the Mac would not boot at all. So be sure you have a backup Bootable HD or Flash drive or CD or other Partition before you mess with this. ;-)

From this behaviour, I suspect that something else is wrong with the AGPM.kext file. Maybe some or the parameters for power-settings are not what they should be. But this is not my area of expertise. I would also  like to understand "why" this works at all without the .kext file.?!?!? There must be some default settings somewhere?

thanks  Terry; I just opened the get info on that kext file; it says Version: 100.12.42.

I was also thinking whether changing permissions would have any effect; there's 'system', 'wheel' and 'everyone'

(but why no 'user'? – there used to be more on the list on previous OS Xs?)

I will leave it be for the moment, with ags disabled.

..... possibly ......further to the above I  discovered by unlocking the kext file I can add back in my admin

user name by clicking on the plus sign at the bottom of the panel and then re-locking it to make changes.

I then re-enabled ags and experienced a clean login past the 5 seconds!

Could this be the answer???

sad to report it only worked the one time; on second reboot, the spinning wheel came back; have to go back and look at that file again

@Metalizer: Good thinking! Glad you eliminated that possibility. Saves the rest of us from having to try. I'm going to try "a patch" instead of replacing the whole plist.info file in the .kext file.

The model number of my machine is A1286 (MBP6,2) and it is a 15-inch. Interestingly, as I said before, the original, unaltered plist.info file on that machine, (after having been Software Updated to 10.6.8 with the video update) has only a set of parameters for MBP6,1 - which (according to everymac.com) is actually the 17-inch model of that vintage!

I am wondering if making a minimal change (by editing) to the plist.info so that the only change is to give the "proper parameters" for my A1286 (15-inch) model, might fix the problem "by the book"? I am going to try it and see what happens. Will let the thread know.

I've gone through several reboot cycles and so far everything seems to be fine. I attempted, as a test, to reinstall the .kext but no matter what I do, I now cannot see it loaded.

I would be grateful if someone could tell me how to properly reinstall the extension. The steps I took were the following:

- Deleted the file

- Made a copy and placed this in one of my personal folders

- Boot to safe mode

- Copy the extension back

- Shutdown/reboot normally

@SDG Consultant: Hi. Thanks again for your sugggestion (to remove the AGPM.kext and get Lion to regen the cache using Safe Mode). But can you tell us "why" it works, even without the .kext?

I was curious about differences between the Lion and Snow Leopard .kext files. So

I used BBEdit's TextWrangler™ to do a line-by-line comparison of the .kext (kernel extension) files, i.e.,

[ ~/System/Library/Extensions/AppleGraphicsPowerManagement.kext/Contents/info.pli st]

for Lion (10.7.2 + Video Update) and the equivalent Snow Leopard (10.6.8 up-to-date).  The results are:

The plist "properties" for my 15"-MacBookPro6,2 are present in both files. The few differences are: 

Heuristic > IdleInterval > (100, P3HistoryLength,2) for Lion vs (250) for SL.

SensorSampleRate (10 in Lion vs. 4 in SL).

There is a small difference in Threshold_High (57,70,80,100) vs. (57,70,83,100)

These are echoed for Vendor10deDevice0a34 (I don't know what this is but it is not my graphics).

Everything else is the same for the MBP6,2 in both plists. I wonder why - because the hardware has not changed, just Mac OS X.

Any ideas?

@SDG consultant: an update. A Google search for Vendor10deDevice0a34 suggests it is a GeForce GT 240M! Not the GT 330M in my machine! It works OK in Snow Leopard but not in Lion.

      http://pci-ids.ucw.cz/read/PC/10de/0a34

I wonder if the different plist.info parameters (Lion vs. SL) combined with the "wrong" device ID are causing this mess?

@SDG consultant: Update2: Correction re. Vendor10deDevice0a34 (GT 240m) in my previous update: Several devices are "nested" inside the pair of <dict> - </dict> tags for each MacBookPro model. So it looks as if they are "alternate devices" of that model. The first device in the nesting is Vendor10deDevice0a29 (GT 330M - the one actually installed), so I guess the definitions for alternatives are not "the problem".

This leaves the differences between IdleIntervals, SensorSampleRate and Threshold_High as possible causes of the AGS-switching problem.

Hi All,

@SDG Consultant's fix (It is simple and has worked for a day or two, for me on my MBP6,2) gave me the idea to ty this. I finally hacked Lion 10.7.2's

~/System/Library/Extensions/AppleGraphicsPowerManagement.kext/Contents/info.plis t

file so that it works without freezing. Before editing this file (using TextWrangler) I moved it to my Desktop, temporarily renamed it and made a copy for safe recovery. Then I edited the parameters (aka properties) for the Vendor10deDevice0a29 (GeForce GT 330M) in the info.plist file to be what they still are in Snow Leopard (10.6.8 + Video Update). The one that was most different was IdleInterval > (100, P3HistoryLength,2) for Lion vs (250) for SL but I also changed the ones for SensorSampleRate, Threshold_High and Vendor10deDevice0a34 (the GT 240M), in a couple of places.

That done, I changed the name back to its original (as above), dropped it back into the .../Extensions folder and rebooted into Safe Mode (flushes the kernel extension cache?). Then I rebooted again, normally. So far, everythng seems fine - no freezes. Maybe Apple's engineers can pick up on this and concoct an update.

I read the first page of this thread and wanted to say that my husband and I are both having startup issues with our MacBook Pros. He has a brand new one, bought this summer (13") and mine is older-can't remember exactly when I got it but it could be 2 years old. We both login automatically. What I am seeing is that my menu items don't fully load and nothing works-the Dock, nothing happens. Same with my hubby. He may see the spinning beach ball at startup-I don't think I always do but I can't do anything. I can move my cursor around but there is nothing to select as nothing works-the Dock is there but when I click on something, it doesn't open. Maybe it's not the same exact issue (sorry, don't have time to read 31 pages of posts) but it's definitely a startup issue. Oh, and since my husband's MBP is new, it arrived with Lion on it.... Judy

@mrstee (Judy): Assuming you are both using Lion my first suggestion (for Judy) is to make sure you have a complete backup (Time-Machine or alternative), or else remove the hard-drive and put it into an external FireWire 800 (fast FW) enclosure for later access. Then install a new 2.5" HD and use your original install DVDs to reinstall (I assume) Snow Leopard onto your new HD; then Use Software Update to bring Snow Leopard up-to-date (10.6.8). Then use the Migration Assistant to pull all your Apps and documents, etc. from your (previous, now external HD) onto your new, Snow Leopard internal drive.

If you take this opportunity to install a larger, faster HD, I chose one of the available 750GB, 7200RPM units from Western Digital, and initialized it with two, bootable partitions - one 250GB and the remainder at 500 GB. I installed Lion on the 250GB and SL on the 500GB partition. This way I can "play" with Lion and see if subsequent Updates fix the problems.Meantime I can be productive using SL. (You can choose which one to boot-up by holding down the [Option] key when you power-on or restart.

Continue using SL until Apple stabilizes Lion for our older Macs. The way things are going, my guess is that it will take at least two more Software Updates before they get it right.

For your husband's new 13-inch - his issues are prpbably different than yours - his MacBookPro must still be under warranty - so I'd take it to let an Apple Certified Technician (or an Apple Genius Bar staffer) troubleshoot it for you. It should not be behaving as you have described. It sounds almost as if you have been booting into "Safe Mode" (by holding down the [Shift]-key - this could delay appearance of the Apple-Menu and Dock, and other symptoms.

Re. my previous post - about my hack of the file:

~/System/Library/Extensions/AppleGraphicsPowerManagement.kext/Contents/info.pli st

Lion on my MBP6.2 is still behaving nicely - no SBBod and no freezes.

My guess is that the critical change was to remove the "parameter/property" indentified as

        <key>P3HistoryLength</key>

           <integer>2</integer>

from the <dict> for both the GeForce GT 240M (Vendor10deDevice034) and GeForce GT 330M (Vendor10deDevice0a29).

These parameters were not used in the Snow Leopard edition of the kext file, and my guess is that neither of these graphics boards knows what to do with the extra parameter.

Does anyone know how to find descriptions of what these parameters/properties are, and how to define them properly? I spent some time looking for specs from NVIDIA and in Apple's KEXT programming guidelines but could not find anything that tells me the parameter-names, types, and how many there should be and in what order the must be presented.