Cursor flickers with random beachballs
I've now had the same really strange pair of two seemingly unrelated issues show up on two different Macs, one a client final-gen white MacBook, and the other a first-gen C2D Mini. Neither has much in the way of 3rd party stuff installed, so I'm kind of at a loss as to what's causing the behavior, and was trying to pin it down before resorting to a wipe and reinstall in an attempt to fix it.
The two things that happen are:
- The cursor, when clicking, will occasionally "flicker" over to the side by an inch or two. It always pops back to where it's supposed to be, and clicks don't register in the wrong place, but you can clearly see it briefly flickering in the wrong location. Sometimes it's fine for a while, sometimes it will do it every time you click.
- The computer will periodically beachball for about 5-10 seconds, despite there being very little CPU activity, plenty of free RAM, and not much disk activity. It seems random, and there seems to be no correlation to any system resource use.
Both systems are running 10.6. The MacBook has no external peripherals at all, and the Mini has a 3rd party wired mouse and Apple wired keyboard. There are a few 3rd party applications and pref panes (Flash, for example) installed on both, but nothing that I haven't seen installed on dozens of other Macs without issues. Hardware Test comes up clean, disk checks are fine, permissions have been repaired, PMC resets done, etc.
Has anybody seen behavior like this? Suggestions of what to try apart from OS reinstall?