Since updating to 10.8.3, my icons have disappeared. Date and Time, battery status and imessage. Other icons like dropbox appear as always. I went to system preferences and made sure they are checked to show in menu bar. Once the box is checked, after a few minutes they uncheck themselves. You can actually see them at start up, before you log in , then they go away.
MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3)
Try removing third-party status menu items and see if they work correctly.
Third-party status menu items that are poorly written can take down the other status menus.
it looks like most 'login items' under 'users and groups' in system preferences on my system were deleted/removed somehow with this update. not sure if this was intentional or an update bug.
This was the hint I needed. My date and time and several menu bar icons (though not all) had disappeared after update to 10.8.3.
I went to Users & Groups/login items and discovered that System Events was unchecked. Checked it, cleaned up some other items, and after a logout/login, all was back to normal.
THANKS, Pendolino!
I was using deploystudio to image my Mac's. The menu bar and finder was not responding properly on only the AD accounts.
There is a setting in the workflow under binding to AD. The "Force local home directories" was unchecked. By default Apple has this checked. If it is not checked then the AD accounts will not function properly.
With "Force local home directories" checked, everytime an AD user logs on, a local home directory is created for that user. This should stablize the menu bar and everything else.
You can also go into directory utility under Active directory advanced options you can can check it there to fix this issue.
It worked for me.
I found this solution here
I updated to 10.8.3 and now my menu bar icons will not load
