Search.Bundle / SystemUIServer - Missing Menu Bar Items

Menu Bar items (or 'menulets' as some prefer to call them), have been randomly disappearing for what seems like forever (ie. over many OS X updates, multiple machines), causing me a series of hoop-jumping to get them back. Usually, I just deal with it (I'm so used to this now), by either un/re-checking PrefPane checkboxes, relaunching SystemUIServer (anyone know how to do this easily via. Terminal? I'd like to somewhat automate this. A simply kill by process name, not ID, would be great), double-clicking .menu items in Core Services, etc. to force them to reappear. I've even put some of the more troublesome menu items into my account's login items (which is a terribly bass-ackward solution, AFAIC).

So I finally bit the bullet and tried resolve this minor annoyance, by following the advice of another ( http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060112133143484). Briefly, the advice says to Trash/Rename/Move search.bundle from Core Services and reboot. This apparently resolves a conflict or corruption between search.bundle and SystemUIServer or something, by spawning a brand new search.bundle upon reboot (and thus supposedly fixing the missing menu bar items issue).

Well, it didn't work. Not only did it not resolve my issue, but I've now lost Spotlight entirely from the menu bar. search.bundle did not respawn as was advised and sadly, my extensive Googling & Apple Discussions searching yielded similar routines, ie: delete search.bundle and restart to force the spawning of a fresh one. So far, I've restarted about 15 times, zapped PRAM, repair permsissions etc., just about everything I can think of, and so far nada.

Would anyone have any more information on this? I'm curious as to why my search.bundle won't reappear, and of course for a simple solution that doesn't involve having to rebless/reinstall my system.

Help! I never realized how much I've come to rely on Spotlight until it was suddenly gone.

(Before anyone asks, I can't restore the original system.bundle, it was inadvertently trashed during one of my reboot attempts.)

PB G4 17", PB G4 15", PB G4 12", Mac OS X (10.4.3)

Posted on Jan 30, 2006 4:48 PM

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1 reply

Jan 30, 2006 10:25 PM in response to Nikolas Zane

Resolved:

1) I grabbed a copy of search.bundle from the girlfriend's PowerBook, dropped it onto mine where it should belong, ran permissions repair, and all seems OK so far - Spotlight has returned and appears to be working as normal.

2) Found the easy Terminal command I was after for killing SystemUIServer for when I want to refresh Menu Items: killall SystemUIServer - this kills and relaunches SystemUIServer, which for me refreshes and returns my full compliment of Menulets. Now to script it for added convenience!

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Search.Bundle / SystemUIServer - Missing Menu Bar Items

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