Menubar Freezes

I was having this problem frequently the first several months after upgrading a 2010 MB to ML. Over the last two months, I have noticed that the problem has been solved. I didn't do a thing to fix it, and I didn't remove any software. All I did was apply all updates along the way and the problem seemed to fix itself.

And now it's almost April of 2013 and Apple still has NOT FIXED THIS ISSUE. Just like someone else said above, keeping my Activity Monitor open and killing the SystemUIServer process every time this happens.

Would love to see a real fix to this problem.

This is what is showing in my menu bar at the top of my screen:

- Dropbox

- Caffeine

- DrivePulse

- iStats Sensors

- iStats Memory

- iStats Disks

- iStats Battery

- iStats Network

- iStats Date and Time

- WiFi

- Sync

- BlueTooth

- Keyboard Language

- Date/Time

- User Account

- Spotlight

- Viscosity

- Alerts

Running Mountain Lion, fully up-to-date at all times, on a 17" MacBook Pro.

Erik

iStatMenus is definitely the culprit but I still love to have it.

What I did is setting up the cron to kill SystemUIServer every 5 min

Steps:

- open Terminal

- type

crontab -e

- press i

- type

*/5 * * * * killall SystemUIServer

- press ESC

- type

:wq

now at Terminal if you type

crontab -l

you should see

$ crontab -l

*/5 * * * * killall SystemUIServer

Hey All,

I had the same problem, details as follows,

Laptop MacBook Pro

Model 13-inch, Late 2011

Processor 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7

Memory 8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3

Graphics Intel HD Graphics 3000 512 MB

Software OS X 10.8 (12A269)

HDD 120 GB Solid State SATA

My solution, that I copy pasted from this link (http://www.technipages.com/mac-os-x-menu-bar-frozen-fix.html ) is:

I’ve seen many occasions where the menu bar in Mac OS X will freeze. You may get the spinning wheel of death and have to force close System Preferences when this happens. Try these steps to fix the issue.

1. Navigate to~/Users/Username/Library/Preferences.

2. Drag the com.apple.systemuiserver.plist file to the Desktop.

This will ‘regenerate’ the preferences file and hopefully fix the issue. If not, place the file back in the Preferences folder.

Had the same issue here but I do not have any instance of com.apple.systemuiserver.plist anywhere on my mac so previous solution could not be attempted.

My system config: 2011-12 27" iMac running Mountain Lion 10.8.3

It does appear that PoPPaP is correct that iStatsMenu is the culprit.

I was able to resolve this issue by simply updating iStatsMenu to the latest version, 4.05 (424)

This latest version seems to include a fix for this. If you are using iStatsMenu, I suggest you update and relaunch and the problem should be solved.

For the record, I have 10 programs in my taskbar in addition to iStatsMenu so isolating this was a bit time consuming, but as I said, it appears that this was the solution...

I hope this helps.

I'm still on a 2006 MBP with a C2D 2.16 and just "upgraded" to 10.7.

I started noticing the exact same behaviour, ie SystemUIServer is periodically using >80% CPU and I got the beachball when I moved the mouse on some of the icons in the menu bar. Removing 3rd party apps from the menu bar didn't help. At first I thought my trustworthy MBP couldn't quite handle the Lion... 😢

The last time this problem occured, I clicked on "Sample Process" in the activity monitor.

While I don't have a clue what this report is trying to tell me exactly 😕, I noticed that terms like "AirPort" or "CWInterface device attached (in CoreWLAN)" appeared quite often.

So for me the solution (at least so far...) was to disable the wifi-icon in the menu-bar. This *seems* to work and since I'm mostly in known wifis, I can live without it.

But still I find this very strange...

For me it's definitely iStat Menus. If I restart without iStat - system runs fine - or at least several days without the problem. Once I start iStat (and just as a test I only put the clock on the menu bar) - within an hour the clock quit advancing (in the menu bar) and SystemUIServer > 100% continuously.