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

Hey guys, i know that you are speaking about the graphic card issue, but I've the same problem, with a Mac Mini Server. I just solved (provisionally I hope) logging from another machine in ssh, and restarting the process :

joshua:~ administrator$ ps aux|grep -i login

root            51372   0,0  0,3  2535480  10932   ??  Ss    7Dic11   0:06.55 /System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app/Contents/MacOS/loginwindow

joshua:~ administrator$ sudo kill -1 51372

I know it's a dirty way, but it works! Better than nothing when you are frozen, I think...

–Mic

Given tne "slowness" you've described, I am wondering it it might be a matter of insufficient "horsepower". The Geekbench scores for that 2.4GHz cpu are about half what I had on my previous MBP6,2.

But I am not discounting other potential causes. The "gray screen of death" and endlessly spinning "gear wheel" you described, sound a lot like what I've seen when booting into "Safe Mode" - and then subsequently doing a normal boot. That gray screen and spinning gear wheel took a long, long time. Even on my mid-2010 MBP6,2.

Courtland: Actually your description ...

"When I when I signed into Apple Support just now to respond to your post, I launched Google Chrome, clicked the bookmark for this forum and then "Sign In" . A saved username & Password window came up (saved, I presume with Google auto-complete),  and I clicked "sign in". The system then froze. I can easily tell just by putting the mouse cursor in a blank area of the top menu bar and try to move the entire window around the desktop. If it doesn't move, it's frozen. So I press the power button momentarily and the "Are You Sure You Want To Shut Down Your Computer Now" Screen comes up & I press cancel. That unfreezes the system."

... is very interesting. I'll try it (i.e., ... pushing the Power Button momentarily...) next time my current 17" MBP 8,3, crashes. The behavior is very similar to what you describe above. And this MBP is a brand new, quad-core CPU with AMD graphics and OEM Lion 10.7 updated to 10.7.2. It "freezes" at random (not reproducible) when using Safari, typically when I have more than one tabbed browser page open and have been hovering over an icon - all of a sudden the mouse-cursor disppears and the machine will not respond to either mouse or keyboard. So far, I have been holding he Power-button down until the machine shuts down.

Terry: Sometimes it takes more than 1 momentary press of the power button to bring up the "Are You Sure You Want To Shut Down Your Computer Now" Screen, but it eventually does get there. Once it's out of Freeze mode this MBP 2.4GHZ is surprisingly fast.

Thanks Courtland. Good to know. If I find a definitive fix for my similar problem before Apple does I'll publish it on this thread.

I got around most problems by disabling the graphics card switching.  However, I still get no display sometimes when coming out of sleep on A/C power.  What I do is unplug my charging cable from MB then display comes back on.

I understand that bugs happen and cause some inconvenience, but this is way beyond that.  Apple should have engineers working on this 24x7 until a fix is released, it is unexcusable!

If they wouldn't have made me upgrade to Lion ( I had to in order to use latest version of XCode), I would never had this problem.  Does Apple not care about those users who had to actually take the upgrade path.

Not all of us can buy a brand new MB everytime you freakin update your software!  My friends MB does not suffer from this, as she has a newer one that came with Lion.

This is a rotten frikken apple.   I mean this bug can cause an average user to be totally locked out of logging in (i.e. using their MB). 

I called Apple care this morning and was transfered over to a senior support rep.  He had me run diagnostics on the machine and he was going to send them to engineering. Crossing my fingers on a solution for this.  Disabling the Automatic Graphic Switching is not a solution, it is a band aid.  Until apple acknowledges this is truely an issue for some of us 2010 Macbook Pro owners, then we must continue to report the situation to them.

Some days I have no problems at all with usernames and passwords. The last 24 hours my MBP has locked up whenever I'm required to put in a password - ANYWHERE - hulu, netflix, switching users, adding new programs, gmail sign-in, iCloud, dropbox, iTunes, whatever. Momentarily pressing the power button won't bring up the "Are You Sure You Want To Shut Down Your Computer Now" Screen, and so I have to press & hold to shut down or unplug & pull the battery. I'm hitting the wall here.

I have a MacBook Pro 2.4GHz i5 with 4GB RAM and SSD HD.

I upgraded to Lion on launch and encountered this locking issue - if I didn't login within a few seconds then I got beach balled.

I'd assumed this was a bad upgrade - however, today my laptop pretty much died with graphics performance dropping off the cliff. I reinstalled a clean install of Snow leopard and reinstalled the upgrade. Horrified to see the same issue.

I have put the graphics switching fix in place but want to know where best to report this issue. Are most people reporting this to local apple support?

Totally unacceptable on a laptop that cost my employer this much!!

Hi Courtland - does it help to disable your automatic login (to Lion - of course I wouldn't expect it to work for other password requests)?

Terry: Up until a week or two ago I was the only User (ie in System Preferences > Users & Groups). And I wouldn't have to sign in when turning on the computer - it would boot to the desktop. The only other User was Guest which is "disabled" as I never checked the box to enable guest access to this compter.

I did set up another User just so I could switch to that user and see if the Freezing issue occured there as well. It does occur when logged in as that user so I presume the freeze issue is system-wide.

Right now I do have automatic login enable for me - so the computer will start with my desktop automatically. I'll uncheck it but won't that require a login screen to choose which user to login to and in turn just add another password window to feed the Lion's appetite for Freezing?

I'll try it and let you know.

Autologon will allow you to get into the system without issue, but why do this?  That is just a band aid just like unchecking the auto graphic switching.  Call apple care and report the issue, this is the only way traction will be made on this issue. 

Courtland: It sounds like I misunderstood your previous post. (Sorry). If you go to

   System Preferences > Accounts > Login Options > the [Automatic login] pop-down list

will either show [Off] or it will show one of your account-names in it. E.g., [Courtland]

If it is not [Off] then (as you probably know) you'll see your own, familiar desktop instead of a list of user-names. In that case I wouldn't expect the Spinning Beach Ball - SBBoD (since there's no login password to be entered) -

But I have never experienced a "freeze" on my Lion-based laptops when entering other (non-login) passwords (do you get the SBBoD in this case? Or is it just a plain, frozen Display with no keyboard or mouse response?). As I think I mentioned before, I DO occasionally get the latter behavior but not when entering passwords.

Gatorsm: This is a 2008-vintage MBP we're talking about, with a single GPU. (probably) out of Applecare/warranty. So it makes sense to try and resolve the problem with available expertise.

I think the same like gatorsm.

I had this problem in my macbook pro 2.4 middle 2010 and i left my laptop in the apple store. A Genious changed me the logic board under warranty (in 3 days after the logic board were in the store) and no more freeze at login since then.