Gray background after wakeup after lion upgrade?

Just checked: clicked sleep than wake up and everything seemed to be ok. Than unplugged power cord. MBP went sleep. Plugged back, several mouse clicks - wakeup - gray background.

The issue persist even without usb hub.

PS. The only one thing I've just encountered is that waking up withou usb hub takes less time. And that's again looks like a bug.

That was mentioned many times here as a workaround. But unfortunately it is not.

If you run several instances of an application before you kill the Dock then after you won't be able to access one of those instances from the Dock. That's another apple bug.

In any case `killall Dock` is somewhat similar to restarting your system as a workaround for any kind of bugz!

Same Problem here. Even if killing Dock seams to be a workaround - there is something badly mased up with the Dock in Lion. I also have extremly Dock Process increation during maven builds (exchausive Terminal usage). Letzs hope for another patch 🙂

One more complaint. I've just purchased wired apple keyboard with numpad. It's great. I connected it to th usb hub I am currently using.

Now when I click sleep mac monitor goes off but mac itself doesn't go sleep. White indicator on the front panel is on and won't go blinking.

So usb might be a part of an issue...

Hello,

I have a 21.5" imac with one HP external display. I have getting the same gray background on the external display after waking up the screens. I placed the dock on the opposite side of the screen from the external display. (eg. my external screen is oriented on the left of the main screen, and my dock is on the right side of my main screen)

I've only been testing the fix for about 20 minutes now, but it seems to have worked.

Hi guys

This has been driving me nuts for ages. I decided to just create a little script to run "killall Dock" and launch it from said Dock.

Script to kill the Dock

In Terminal:

Create a text file called Killdock

vi ~/KillDock

Add this to KillDock:

#!/bin/sh

cd ~

killall Dock

Save and exit

Make the file executable:

chmod 755 KillDock

Test it by running ./KillDock

You can then launch it from the dock itself by doing the following:

Either in Finder or in Terminal, rename KillDock to KillDock.command

In Finder, drag the KillDock.command file to the Dock (it will only go to the right of the separator next to the Trash bin.

---

Yes I know this is not a fix - same as everything here, but only an easier workaround - until Appl€ fix this very annoying bug!

Hope this helps!

Really nice review. Thanks.

I am experiencing 90% of issues you've just mentioned except I don't work in photoshop so I have no problems related to it. So I can't confirm p10.

I am wathcnig that thread for a long time and there were couple of updates but it looks like no one in Apple even cares! And that's a kind of weird taking into consideration MPB price.

So I confirm issues p1-p9. On top of it, all that clamshell concept is a total crap.

1. User should have an option to choose when MBP will go sleep, when to stay awake even with a closed lid (overheating is not an issue as long as is is perfectly ok to work with an external monitor)

2. MPB should never try to power on internal screen when the lid is closed. It is just stupid and non sense. That's what even cheap laptops would no do...

One more related. Dock has a bug with multiple running aps icons.

There is a command open -n ...

bash-3.2$man open

-n Open a new instance of the application(s) even if one is already running.

I am personally using two skype instances and one skype icon often dissappears from Dock. And always will dissappear when the gray background issue happens or when the Dock was reloaded with "killall Dock"

I've also had the same annoying gray background issue (Lion, MBP i7, external monitor via miniDP->DVI).

Interestingly, the issue actually went away some time ago, and I almost forgot the whole thing. But now I had to switch to another SSD, and this new installation of Lion instantly brought back the same problem (I made a fresh install instead of restoring from a backup). Hardware is the same (apart from the SSD), and the Lion version is also now the latest, same as with the previous SSD.

Now I'm thinking that maybe there was some voodoo earlier in this thread I tried that actually helped! Have to go back and check...

jamwww wrote:

Oh yeah, must be the random screensaver thing, I had screensaver disabled previously. Disabled it now for this new installation as well, fingers crossed...

Sorry for the false alarm. It wasn't the screensaver, the thing has happened twice after disabling it. Who knows, maybe it happens less frequently now, but it definitely didn't go away entirely 😟 I'm still baffled about what's different now compared with the previous Lion install.

Something changed, don't know if it was the update 10.7.4 or not. The grey background has not appeared since the upgrade but all the open windows are still rearranged in a random manner (some almost of the screen) and resized (some only showing a toolbar) after the screen has gone to sleep (and wakeup).

Actually the MacBook doesn't go to sleep anymore. I didn't notice it before but the MacBook does not enter standby (suspend to RAM) anymore when on AC power. This happened when upgrading to Lion. I know this cause my second MacBook now has the same issue after upgrading from Snow Leopard.

Very annoying and remembers me of the days I had laptops running XP. Standby mode always had issues so I was happy when my first MacBook worked flawlessly. Now I'm having a deja vu.

Please Apple fix it!

Same thing, in my setup (Lion) i use the MBPro display as primary and the external with mdp->dvi connection. The MBpro turns grey after wake up, while the external stays fine. Killing/respawnong the Dock process resolves the issue.

Still happens to me in 10.7.4. Since I have the display settings icon in the menu bar, the fastest way to reset it to turn mirroring on and then off. This has the unfortunate side effect of squishing my windows, but they are easily restored.

Anyone have a bug number for this so I can file my own vote?

Since killing the dock and letting it restart seems to work well here is a more automated solution for you. Just put the following into a file (called mine
"fix_screen") and then make it executable. From terminal you can do this with something like "chmod ugo+x fix_screen". You should then be able to click to launch this (put it in the dock on my machine to allow easy access) and it will kill the dock for you and fix your issue. Just replace my username "petersr" with yours in the script below. I'm sure there are simpler shell scripts to do the same thing but I'm a perl guy and this was quickest for me:

#!/usr/bin/perl

system("ps -u petersr | grep Dock > /tmp/out");

open(IF,"/tmp/out");

while ($line=<IF>) {

if ($line =~ /Dock.app/) {

@fields=split(/\s+/,$line);

# print "Killing process $fields[2]\n";

system("kill $fields[2]");

}

}

close(IF);

system("rm /tmp/out");

I also have had this problem since 10.7.1. I'm now running 10.7.4 and the issue is still not resolved! I've connected my display through a Mini-DisplayPort to VGA adapter. Anybody else have issues with the VGA adapters giving bleed-like image on the monitor? I've tried two adapters now, and 1 also got replaced under warranty, they all seem to have this problem. When I hook up my display directly to a PC it doesn't have the bad image quality.

Was thinking about getting a thunderbolt display but since Apple does a poor job working out bugs nowadays I think I'm going to reconsider. Wish this would get fixed, manually quitting the dock is a hassle. We pay premium amounts of money for these machines and they're supposed to work perfectly, yet they don't!