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USB Devices freezing OS X Lion 10.7.4

Same issue affecting two brand new notebooks (by 'brand new' I mean they've been out-of-the-box for less than two weeks):

Notebook #1: MacBookPro8,2 - 15", i7, 2,4GHz, 4GB SDRAM (Late 2011)

Notebook #2: MacBookPro9,1 - 15", i7, 2,6GHz, 8GB SDRAM (Mid 2012)

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The facts:

As soon as I plug in any USB device the available memory (say, 6,60Gb in the Mid '12 MacBook) starts dropping to only 18Mb or so after about 30 seconds... couple of minutes if I'm lucky. After about 5 minutes the MacBook(s) becomes fully unresponsive, dock won't show up, cursor won't move and so on (the only thing moving on the screen would be the spinning pinwheel) and all of a sudden the force quit applications window would show up displaying only finder in the list, since I have no other apps running. Relaunching finder doesn't solve the problem, in case you were wondering. Software, firmware, drivers, system and everything is up-to-date, so, that's not it. Unplugging and re-plugging the device won't work, resetting the PRAM and NVRAM would make the trick only once and the only way a device would work properly is by shutting down the MacBook, plugging the device in while it's still off and then turning it on again (which is extremely annoying when you have to switch USB devices 20-30 times a day.)

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Something of a solution:

While monitoring the system I found out every time I plug in a USB device a process named SystemUIServer is the one exhausting the available memory, therefore, the one responsible for freezing the computer. (Force) quitting the process has proven to be an effective-yet-not-satisfactory solution: this way devices would work just fine, available memory would go back to normal and I can keep working, but it's not the way it's supposed to be, right?

Does anyone know how to fix this issue for good?

P.S.

I'm new to Mac, so, if I said/asked something obvious, please let me know.

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Devices tested so far:

- Wacom Intuos3 pen tablet (PTZ-630).

- Windows-formatted LG external HDD HXD5 500GB

- Epson Stylus CX3200 printer

- Mac-formatted iPod classic 160GB (Late 2009)

- Windows-formatted iPod 30GB (5,5Gen)

- Kingston DataTraveler flash drive 2GB

- Kingston DataTraveler Vault-Privacy 64GB

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.4)

Posted on Jul 24, 2012 12:35 AM

17 replies

Aug 15, 2012 12:08 PM in response to LOBO v.2

I would recommend not doing this.

I'm on a Bamboo pen & touch. I was running the latest Wacom driver when this happened. Looks like the latest update was 3 Jan 2012.

It could be if you clean everything out, then reinstall, that it works OK, but I need to make sure my machine is all cool for a few days before I try that, and I suspect it won't work.

Aug 16, 2012 8:29 AM in response to superreggie

I had a similar issue but only with Mountain Lion on a new MBP. It came with Lion installed then I used time machine to copy most of my other MBP's stuff to it. It was ok until I upgrade to Mountain Lion about a month later. I was getting Kernal Panics and restarts once a day and tried a bunch of stuff Apple Support requested but it was still happening. I uninstalled the Wacom Drivers last week and haven't seen a panic since then. The tablet wasn't even plugged in when it happened.

So far so good. I'll have to wait now for Wacom to update the drivers as it appears to be the likely culprit.

USB Devices freezing OS X Lion 10.7.4