Empty Buttons, Icons in Safari, Mail, Finder, ... since OSX Mountain Lion, a restart won't help. Can anyone help?

I have the exact same problem here.

It started happening after some other weird incidents. First, when I woke up the computer from sleep, some parts of the screen were corrupted (like an old TV set with poor signal). I decided to restart the computer, and when I did it, the icons were gone.

This is a brand new MBA 2012 with a fresh Mountain Lion install.

I tried creating a new user, and the new user works fine. It seems like something inside my home directory got corrupted.

I tried several tips relating to com.apple.finder folders and plist files, to no avail.

I had this same exact issue (twice now...) . I reinstalled ML over my existing system and it seems to be corrected.

This just happened to my 10.8.1 menubar after waking from sleep:

Resolved by opening the new notification center. Upon opening the notification center, the menubar returned to normal.

I have been having the same problem on my rMBP. It first happened a month ago. I then completely reinstalled the OS and didn't use migration assistant. The problem went away.

Then, a month later, my MBP woke up from sleep and wouldn't allow me to open Safari. I rebooted, and suddenly my icons were gone again!

I restored my whole disk from Time Machine (took hours) and it all worked OK again.

Then, a week later, I boot, and it won't let me login. I force-power-off, then reboot. It lets me in, but now the icons are gone again!

I know I can restore from backup, but I can keep doing that every 2 weeks!

Other info: This problem is account-based, not whole OS. In other words, when this happens to one account, I can login to another account and it will be fine on that account. It's a corruption of some sort in the User account/files.

Here are two other threads on the same subject:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4145309?answerId=19230426022#19230426022

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4589599

I have the same problem! after waking from sleep, the band appeared on both the TV when damaged antenna, and after a reboot all the buttons are empty ....😮

Is there a solution to this problem?

I have ordered another 13 inch rmbp, and after sleeping rmbp for one night. When I wake it up, both old TV with damaged antenna issue and icon missing issue happen. It is very frustrating. Now I even can not use Finder because every time I open the finder, there is no icon and text in sidebar and Finder crashes.

Having this exact same issue. MBP went to sleep after I let the battery drain. Plug it in and wake it up and had a ton of snow/fuzz/distortion. Reboot and the buttons are all blank.

So that problem just happened to me today.

One interesting thing is that i switch to another account on the same computer and the icons are there.

Any idea?

Same problem here (10.8.3 full up-to-date OS)...

Button icons vanished 15 days ago...

Today, after waking from sleep, several critical errors forced me to reboot my machine (Parallels and Safari crashed). After reboot, I can't do login with any user. Once entered the password, a gray screen appeared for about 5 seconds, then I was back to the login screen.

I rebooted my rMBP in Safe Boot (reboot while keeping pressed SHIFT). The login in safe boot was successful. Reboot in normal mode, ALL PROBLEMS VANISHED. Now I've got back my icons in all apps and, of course, I can do the login.

HTH...

Was working between quite a few programs and went to fire up Transmission and saw that all of its button icons were blank. Also noticed that the bluetooth, wifi, sound and spotlight icons in my menubar were missing. Rebooted and they were still gone. Did a reboot into safemode and then back and they are now showing. Don't know why this keeps happening. The interesting thing this time was that while in the finder window I could see all of the buttons....

Safe boot method above (bastio84) worked for me.

However, since I had set a Firmware Password normal safe boot (press S when restarting) method didn't work.

I had to enter the following in terminal :

sudo nvram boot-args="-x"

then entered my Mac password (since sudo requires root access).

I then did a normal restart from the Apple menu. The icons came back.

I then entered the following in terminal to reset to normal mode :

sudo nvram boot-args=""

Then restarted again.

At that point (so far) everything went back to normal and all icons are there.

Now, why did they suddenly disappear tonight - I have no idea, I did nothing signficant - just some web browsing and then they were gone in Safari and Finder. Hmmmm ....

Ed

Interestingly the problem just came back ... and the solution above worked again.

Hello everyone,

Well I've got a mid 2009 Macbook Pro and I've been having the screen problem for almost 3 years now. Almost everytime I restarted my MBP from sleep, the screen was all messed up (like snow on tv)... The problem with missing symbols on the buttons appeared to me 4 months ago for the first time. I didn't have time to do much research but I eventually found out that creating a new account was resolving the problem... Until 3 weeks ago. My new account was showing the same problems and my old account got even worse... Like people have explained here, on my old account almost all Apple apps refused to start. I have not tried the safemode option, because I only stumbled on this forum today. But I have reinstalled the Os over itself and all worked well.... Until today. The battery was drained while the MbP was in standby and the accound that was active then is all messed up again.

So here are my 2 conclusions...

1) this problems happens on my MbP only when the battery drains while in standby

2) all that is Apple is not gold... I have never experienced so much hardware problems with any of my windows based computers... And never have I had so many software crashes on these Pc's than I have had with my Macbook Pro and my Mac Pro.... They are nice when they are working... But unfortunately Apple doesn't seem to able to program stable software.

Nief

I had the same problem with a MacBook Air and the Safe Boot tip from bastio84 fixed everything.

yep, being experienced by several. nother thread about it here

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4498102?start=90&tstart=0