I have had this issue since I upgraded to Lion. Textedit keeps a 'save' floating window open in the lower left corner of the screen. The only thing visible is a disembodied "File Format" and a dropdown. I can't get rid of it and it's not linked to any open document. Just there. Very annoying. I can open the drop down list but nothing else. I included a screen shot with using a MS Word doc to provide a white background.
MacBook, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
Really? No one has an answer to this in more than a year? Apple has really screwed up TextEdit with the latest OS updates.
It's a user to user forum, not a forum packed with Apple software engineers. It had 100 views. No one apparently even had a guess what would cause that, or they would have said something.
And why resurrect a year old thread?
Because I have the same problem right now. Figured that would be better than making a new thread.
That's certainly fair enough. Still have no idea though, but can throw a few things out.
Can you close TextEdit with Command+Q when it's the foreground app, as in the image above?
Can your force quit TextEdit, or does it not even show up in the Force Quit Applications box (Command+Option+Escape).
Yep, it closes just fine and the dropdown disappears. The dropdown disappears after a while on its own as well, though it comes back once in a while. It's a very intermittent problem so I expect it will either get fixed by accident or just keep happening.
though it comes back once in a while.
The spector drop down comes back even with TextEdit closed?
No, I'm sorry (that would be insane). It comes back when I re-open the app.
No, I'm sorry (that would be insane).
Indeed it would. I was just wondering if something was happening in the area of screwed up display buffer, or other related memory errors.
It comes back when I re-open the app.
That is weird. Probably has to do with the Autosave/Versions feature of Lion and later. TextEdit tries to always come back to the last state (i.e. a bunch of text you has already started). It may have gotten trapped in a spot it's not supposed to. Big, BIG time guessing here, though.
Yeah, thank you anyway for looking. TextEdit is just much, much, much much much worse since Mountain Lion. Slow as molasses to open or save, crashes frequently, and requires a workaround to not default to saving on the cloud.
In Lion through Mavericks, you can use the Snow Leopard version of TextEdit instead. Delete the current version from the Applications folder. Create a folder in your user account named Applications (alongside Documents, Downloads, etc.), and put the SL version of TextEdit in that folder. You need to put it there so a Repair Permissions doesn't destroy it. With the Lion or later version of TextEdit gone, the OS will automatically find and use the older version.
Now that is helpful. Thanks.
You're welcome, Rogue.
Since Lion, OS X tosses out the message that you can't delete items in the Applications or Utilities folder because "xxxx is required by the OS". Baloney. There's nothing the least bit critical about that particular version of TextEdit, or a lot of other apps. I routinely dump about 20 of them when I install the OS fresh.
The desktop method of getting past that message is to do a Get Info on TextEdit. Click the lock at the lower right corner and enter your admin password. Then change all of the permissions to Read/Write and close the Get Info box. Now you can put the Lion version of TextEdit in the trash without any message saying "you can't do that".
Floating Textedit 'save' window ghost
