Menu bar icons continually refreshing

Now, the desktop flashes gray for a fraction of a second, every ~5 seconds.

This flashing resets a lot of UI stuff. For instance, if you have the dock open and the screen flashes, the dock disappears, and then reanimates back up again. Also, if you minimize something, the window disappears (without the animation), but then after the flashing happens, the window reopens with a scale-from-the-middle animation effect.

These bugs have basically rendered my computer useless. All of this started happening prior to the Mountain Lion 10.8.2 update.

Any ideas on how to get a handle on this would be great.

Also, Spotlight is completely non-functional. Any attempt to open the search box (either through clicking the icon or using Command+Space) causes the menu bar to reset.

Finder also crashes the instant I try to open a new window.

No, everything is pretty stock.

Most apps seem largely unaffected. Opening a browse dialog for a file attachment in Mail works as expected. After some more testing, I discovered the issues with the following UI workflows:

Mission Control - The Mission Control overlay disappears and goes back to standard desktop view, however, the menu bar disappears completely. Opening up Mission Control and selecting an element before the next flash happens resets the menu bar back to its rightful place.

Launchpad - The Launchpad overlay simply disappears.

Notification Center - Notificaton Center just disappears, also.

Command+Tab Switcher - The switcher overlay disappears and the application that you had tabbed to does not become the active app.

Curiously, the actual menus in the menu bar (File, Edit, etc.) work as expected even through the flashes and the menu bar icon resets.

I just installed the Mountain Lion 10.8.2 Combo package and it seems to have fixed that UI stuff. Everything still feels slower, but that might just be a psychological thing.

Here's the link for anyone who might be experiencing this issue: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1581

Please note that I still am not aware of the root cause of the original problems, so I have no advice on how to avoid this issue in the first place.

I lied. After about 5 minutes of use, the menu bar icons started resetting again. The gray flashing hasn't begun happening yet, however.

Hey Nick,

No, a different user seems to be working without any problems; However, I just tried using the Guest account, since this computer uses an LDAP server to validate usernames and passwords.

Something is certainly causing a crash, though. New records are being written in Console every time it crashes (which is like every 9 seconds or so), and I can force a crash by opening Spotlight.

Here is a link to the logs that Console generates: http://pastebin.com/qwTCeFt5

And here's a link to the "saved crash report": http://pastebin.com/SU1atABL

I have no idea how helpful that is, but it's all I have for now.

Here's a crash report for Finder, too: http://pastebin.com/gBTcu6ti

The gray screen flickering started happening again this morning. According to the console, the Dock is crashing about once every 4 seconds.

Here's a crash report for that: http://pastebin.com/sinDatua