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

The F12 trick still works for me, at least 8 out of 10 times.

At the log in screen, if you see the beach ball, press F12 once. Enter your password hit Enter and press F12 again.

If you have to press F12 more than twice to log in, then it just might not work for that session You'd have to restart but like i said, it is the only solution that have worked for me for the past several months.

I really hope Apple can fix this soon...very soon.

Used to be able to log in multiple account and switch between them without any problem in Tiger. When switched to Leopard, it was still ok, then when i upgraded to Snow Leopard, the privilage was gone. I could no longer log in and use a different account (while stiill logged in another account) without seeing my cursor turned into a beach ball. The same problem not only continue to exist when i upgraded to Lion but it gets worst.

Zul,

May I ask where this F12 trick came from?

Since this problem with logon and SBBoD has begun I had to learn more specific OS X details.

Thanks.

Helmet1969, The F12 trick was discovered by accident. F11 works as well.

Same problem:

- Macbook Pro mid-2010 2.53 Lion 10.7.2 hangs quite often (spinning beach ball) at login screen when booting.

- TextEdit sometimes gets the spinning beachball for 30 seconds or so

Things that make me suspicious:

- I have upgraded to 8GB RAM

- I use a wireless Logitech M505 mouse

These issues did not exist when I was using Snow Leopard do pretty sure this MUST be a software problem.

Are their any guaranteed software workarounds for this?

Any word of a fix from Apple?

Thanks,

/Brian

Just wanted to add my experience if it's helpful. 

- Macbook Pro mid-2010 2.53 ordered on first day of release

- 8GB factory installed RAM

- Anti-glare screen

- Lion 10.7.2

Constantly freezing at login screen when the power cable was attached and froze intermittently at login when on battery.  Initially the beachball then after the 10.7.2 update it was the grey box telling me to reboot.  Prior to Lion I can honestly say my Macbook had never once crashed.  It was easily the best computer I've ever owned.

Now for my experience -

I took it into my local genius bar in London and demonstrated the problem.  I told them about this thread and other websites pointing to the fact it is an issue with the graphic card switching.  They did not want to accept this.  They did a re-install of Lion and told me the problem was fixed.  On pick-up I tested and it was as bad as ever. 

They then took it back to do more diagnostics and had it for six days.  I was told that the problem was the HP software associated with my printer and they'd removed this.  On pick-up I once again tested it at the Genius bar and it was crashing over and over again.

This time the tech from the Genius room came out and we discussed this for over an hour whilst he ran through various diagnostic tests which showed my Macbook pro and the graphics card was perfectly fine!  Fortunately I'd printed out this thread and a number of others.  I got the usual about my computer being out of warranty but I did point out that in the UK the warranty was in addition to my consumer rights and not my exclusive rights.  The Sale of Goods Act 1979 states a product must be "durable" and it is my view that a laptop costing more than £2,000 should last longer than 17 months (this was when I installed Lion).

The tech I dealt with did not think it was a hardware issue but agreed to install a new logic board at no cost to me.  I picked up my Macbook yesterday and so far so good.  I did 20 restarts and shutdowns at the bar, both on power and off power with no problems other than the first log-in where it froze (spinning beachball) which was on battery only.

Last night at home it froze (spinning beachball) on the first start-up from cold (on battery only) but then worked as I tested it over and over again.  I then left it for five hours and started on battery power with no problems.

Hopefully the replacement Logic board has resolved the issue.  The genius I dealt with did suggest that as an educated guess the problem may be the Intel graphics chip and it was just one of those things.  He did say if this has not resolved the issue then it is likely to be a software issue.

Apologies for the length of post but as a footnote I think it's important to say that the Apple staff were all very nice and very friendly people.  I found them first class to deal with but think they're possibly constrained by the fact Apple HQ are not acknowledging that this is a very real problem for many people.  Despite this they were incredibly good at dealing with my issue.

Slight error above - it's the i7 2.66 processor.  Apologies but I'm not a techie at all!

Mr Sifter,

You have the exact same machine as me but you got it with factory installed RAM whereas I did a manual upgrade. That would point to my RAM not being the issue which I was sort of suspecting anyhow with the sheer number of people reporting this problem now.

It's good that you got your your board replaced for free but if you experienced a hanging last night its not looking good. I would tend to agree with your Genius... it simply does not make sense that this is solely a hardware problem... how could it be, when for a lot of people on this thread it was working fine under Snow Leopard and now under Lion it hangs? Logically, it can only be one of two things:

- A software problem

- A software problem that replacing the hardware will fix. Ie, replacing the hardware will make it work with the current dodgy software

Even the 2nd of these options seems unlikely but possible. Therefore please let us know if the new board does indeed resolve the issue

At the moment I have turned on automatic login to see how that goes.

/Brian

Bear in mind: a fundamental error in the actual operating system would not show up in any diagnostic tool – something that seems to constantly elude our "Geniuses"; you'd actually need to bring your machine to the main labs at Infinite Loop and talk personally to the OS X programmers as well as the designers of all logic boards.

Until someone actually can achieve this, we will be talking ourselves into our own 'infinite loop' here.

Funnily enough I made a very similar point to the Techie I was dealing with.

He was a really lovely guy and I felt bad complaining but I told him that a diagnostic tool will only pick up known errors and if it's not looking for the right thing in the correct place then it'll never find it.

My point to him ultimately was that in classic Apple "no comment" style everyone is being hung out to dry.  I can only assume they are trying to fix this in HQ as we type.

I'm going to test it every night when I get home from  work and will report back on later in the week.

The thing is, that it's not gpu switching related as I stated this happens to me on Mac Pro with ONE gpu installed. It never ever happened before 10.7 and it never ever happened on my Macbook Pro (2010 model).

As I already noted, I can override the freeze pulling out DVI cable and putting it back...This somehow starts something in OS X...Might be something interrupt related as already stated by some other user!

This is definetely something geniuses can't detect with existing tools. This tread speaks for itself that it is a problem for quite some users and it all started with 10.7!

Hi Alen. Have you yet tried (temporarily) trashing Lion's version of the

    /System/Library/Extensions/AppleGraphicsPowerManagement.kext

file? I am wondering it if will work for those of us who have Mac models that only have a single GPU. (I am not one of these so I cannot test it).

If you do this test there is a risk that your Mac may not be able to boot, so make sure you have an alternate way of rebooting - e.g., your original Mac OS X installation DVD or a bootable external drive.

Hi Mr Sifter. Your long-post is interesting. Thanks. It sounds like you had the same MBP6,2 (2.66 GHz i7, 2-core CPU) as I had. As mentioned in previous posts, I found a workable software solution that started with SDG Consultant's "band-aid fix" (temporarily trashing Lion's version of the

    /System/Library/Extensions/AppleGraphicsPowerManagement.kext

file). After that worked for me - I examined the differences between Lion's version of the related info.plist file and the one in the Snow Leopard version. I found some apparent "errors" in the Lion version and removed them. But I also wonder if I could have accomplished the same thing by simply replacing the Lion info.plist file with the one from Snow Leopard. I.e.,

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

You could try the first suggestion (above) but make sure you have an alternative boot-disk. E.g., your OEM MacOS X Install DVD or an external bootable drive. You'd need to be comfortably "techie" to wade into the second one.

@MrSifter: P.S. You make an interesting point, about "cold starts" (temperature-wise) versus warm-starts. (perhaps temperature can affect critical timing parameters?). I had wondered about that but never systematically tested it, since other forum posters mentioned that they (also) had the "Spinning Beach Ball" freeze when using Safari. This suggested that AGS switching was a root cause - if Safari invoked a switch from the Intel GPU to the nVidia one.

However, the underlying cause of all these symptoms may be related to routines in the OS kernel that handle "power management" (hence the effectiveness of trashing the AGPM.kext file, for some of us). And (Apple's) correcting them may fix a whole set of related bad behaviours.

@MrSifter: re. my P.S. - of course this leaves out anyone with a Mac that only has a single GPU - like Alen. But it would explain why trashing the /System/ .../AGPM.kext/ ... file still might "fix" the problem, if (one of) the "bug(s)" in the kernel dealing with Power Management was located therein.

Terry,

Tonight from a cold start and on battery only I got the Spinning Beach Ball but on subsequent logins it was fine.

I've since tried Prasi's fix - removing the     /System/Library/Extensions/AppleGraphicsPowerManagement.kext

rebooting on safe mode etc etc.

Stupidly I never had any backups as I hadn't read your post. Anyway I was able to go through all the steps and reboot and will report back tomorrow from a cold start. I've not left it to cool down tonight as my wife is still using the computer!

Thanks for all your help and dedication to this thread.