Vanishing Drop-down menus

Question

Level 1

25 points

Vanishing Drop-down menus

Hi,

The last couple of days I have been experiencing the following issue, despite having not installed any new software or changed anything whatsoever.

When I click the menu bar at the top, the drop-down menu appears as normal. However, within anywhere from almost instantly to about four seconds, the menu will disappear. The same thing appears to be happening with right-click menus. If anyone has any experience or advice regarding this issue the help would be appreciated.

I have tried restarting, shutting down and zapping the PRAM

I am using a 15" MacBook Pro Non-Retina August 2012, 2.3GHz Intel Core i7, 8GB MHz DDR3 memory

I am running OSX Mountain Lion 10.8.5

Again, nothing has been changed or updated in several weeks but I have never experienced this issue prior to yesterday.

Thanks in advance for your help

~Ian

MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2012), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4), (Parallels: Win 7, '98, XP, Ubuntu)

Posted on Oct 21, 2013 9:31 PM

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Answer 1

arthur

Level 5

5,242 points

Oct 21, 2013 10:21 PM in response to ulianov465

I'd try:

a safe boot Mac OS X: What is Safe Boot, Safe Mode?
a test user account Isolating an issue by using another user account
boot into your recovery partition and repair your hard drive When to Run First Aid in Mountain Lion's Disk Utility - For Dummies
repairing permissions wouldn't hurt, but it doesn't sound like a permissions issue About Disk Utility's Repair Disk Permissions feature
if none of that is helpful, I'd reinstall ML over your current installation with the combo updater OS X Mountain Lion Update v10.8.5 (Combo)
or wait a few hours for Mavericks to come out.

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Answer 2

ulianov465 Author

Level 1

25 points

Oct 21, 2013 10:28 PM in response to arthur

I'll try those tomorrow and let you know. Honestly, the last option sounds the most appealing.

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Answer 3

kai16

Level 1

0 points

Jan 28, 2014 9:34 AM in response to ulianov465

This error was introduced with mavericks on my system. any other ideas to solve that? thanks. kai

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Answer 4

Eric Root

Level 10

684,033 points

Jan 28, 2014 10:55 AM in response to kai16

If the problem is still there, try booting into the Safe Mode using your normal account. Disconnect all peripherals except those needed for the test. Shut down the computer and then power it back up after waiting 10 seconds. Immediately after hearing the startup chime, hold down the shift key and continue to hold it until the gray Apple icon and a progress bar appear. The boot up is significantly slower than normal. This will reset some caches, forces a directory check, and disables all startup and login items, among other things. When you reboot normally, the initial reboot may be slower than normal. If the system operates normally, there may be 3rd party applications which are causing a problem. Try deleting/disabling the third party applications after a restart by using the application un-installer. For each disable/delete, you will need to restart if you don't do them all at once.

Safe Mode

Safe Mode - About

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