Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Screen sharing in Yosemite - lots of weird graphical artifacts

I have Yosemite installed on both my MBP 2013 Retina and a brand-new Mac Mini (headless). I control the Mini from the MBP with standard built-in screen sharing. It works, but visually it's really bad! Often the remote menu bar goes black, and only repaints (in sections) if I hover the mouse over it. Often the toolbars of various windows take on the color of the desktop and do not display any of their widgets - again until I hover over them. Dragging windows sometimes leaves permanent "trails" and other graphical residue.


The Mini is pretty much running on default settings (although I did set it up by cloning the backup of my previous Mini). In particular, I've not activated any Accessibility options, nor am I using the "dark menu bar" general option.


Is anyone else seeing this? Or can someone suggest some troubleshooting?

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Early 2013)

2.4 GHz Intel Core i7

8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

Intel HD Graphics 4000 1024 MB

10.10 (14A389)

Mac mini (Late 2014)

2.6 GHz Intel Core i5

8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

Intel Iris (null)

10.10 (14A389)

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Early 2013), OS X Yosemite (10.10)

Posted on Oct 24, 2014 6:15 PM

Reply
6 replies

Nov 14, 2014 8:38 PM in response to Chap Harrison

Yesterday, for the first time since before starting this thread, I restarted the Mac Mini. Suddenly, everything seems fine.


The reason I restarted the Mini was that I noticed (using Activity Monitor) that 6.5GB of my RAM was in use, and SystemUIServer itself was using 2GB. I've haven't been using the Mini for much of anything recently, so this made no sense. Restarting immediately brought back my menu bar (which had been black), and I don't see any artifacts using Screen Sharing.


*shrug* we'll see. If you have this problem and haven't restarted the remote machine, try that.

Nov 16, 2014 3:03 PM in response to Chap Harrison

Okay - several days later and I had some weird stuff. Had SysPrefs open, clicked on View menu which produces a long list. It seemed to go *behind* the toolbar but in front of the rest of the window. Afterward, when I switched into Finder, the SysPrefs toolbar took on the appearance of the desktop behind it.


I had brought up the iStat Menus v5 app to reconfigure some of its menulets shortly before this began happening, FWIW.

Jan 15, 2015 12:36 AM in response to Chap Harrison

I'm seeing the black menu thing, and a few other weird graphical bugs (roundrect corners of app windows all messed up, some layering issues (hidden menus/etc). The black menu thing seems to be triggered when I use an app to switch resolutions, since I'm running the mini as a headless server and don't want to be limited to the smaller default resolutions it offers. Not sure how to make those resolutions stick though and since changing it to one of these causes the black menubar issue, I'm gonna forget about it for now. Might try a video dongle fix to trick it into behaving, though not sure that will fix all of these issues.

Jan 15, 2015 1:14 AM in response to Chap Harrison

I am almost positive this is related to the graphics card in the Mac Mini not being properly activated when a screen is not attached. The same thing happens with my Mac Mini, but if I have a screen plugged in, it does not have a problem. This might be related to a change to a hardware accelerated desktop or something, but Apple needs to provide some sort of fallback for devices that won't enable the graphics card without a display attached.

Screen sharing in Yosemite - lots of weird graphical artifacts

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple ID.