OS X Yosemite Keeps Crashing To Log-In Screen

My Macbook Pro 15" Retina (mid-2012) has been crashing to login screen several times per day since I installed Yosemite. Appears especially with an external display connected and always at a very random moment. Never experienced this on Mavericks. Looking at the WindowServer*.crash logs in the Console application, the reason is always something like this:

...

Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)

Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x0000000000000032

VM Regions Near 0x32:

-->

__TEXT 000000010d8bd000-000000010d8be000 [ 4K] r-x/rwx SM=COW /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreGraphics.framework/Versions/A/Resources/WindowSe rver

Thread 0 Crashed:: Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

0 com.apple.CoreGraphics 0x00007fff92af839d color_space_get_md5_digest + 24

1 com.apple.CoreGraphics 0x00007fff92fcd8f5 color_space_get_identifier + 9

2 com.apple.CoreGraphics 0x00007fff92e16a47 CGXColorSpaceRegistryCopyRegisteredColorSpace + 42

...

After some googling, I decided to reset the NVRAM on my laptop by pressing Cmd+Option+R+P at bootup (as described here: How to Reset NVRAM on your Mac - Apple Support). I haven't experienced a single crash for 3 days now. It's still too early to say the problems are gone but looks promising.

I work at three different locations, using three different external displays. The problem was much more frequent on one of the models where I was using a custom calibrated color profile. Since the crash logs indicate the problem is always related to color conversion, I also switched from the custom calibrated profile to a standard "Color LCD" profile for that display. However, OS X still picks a model specific profile for the other two displays and still no crashes on those either. So I tend to believe it was the NVRAM reset that did the trick rather than the display profile change. Not 100% sure though.

Stay tuned...

JuSt reset NVRAM and it has made NO difference at all...

My Mac is still broke and I am still pi@@ed off...

10.10.2 combo updated it's out, last time, when I got this problem with Mavericks, installing the 10.9.2 Combo solved the login screen crash problem.

The thing now is I get an error and it seems a kind of bug:

Re: 10.10.2 Combo update "can't be installed on this disk"

Have just updated and it's been running fine for about ten minutes now and all good 🙂

i hope this is the end of this problem now but will update further in a few days or so...

Similar with me - I updated on yesterday afternoon (28th) and my MacBook Air is up and running till then. I tried a lot of processor-intensive tasks, but the fan remained silent (fan running like crazy was always an indicator of another upcoming crash, i.e. logging me off and displaying the login screen). Let's hope for the best...

Bad news, after installing Combo update 10.10.2, still having the crashes!!!!

😟

Been using 10.10.2 since the beta releases and yet to have a single spontaneous log out. Until recently I hadn't been doing as much disconnecting and reconnecting of my external display (so was unwilling to "call it") but have done this several times a day for a week and not a single hiccup. During the beta phase my Magic Trackpad and Apple Wireless Keyboard wouldn't reconnect until I restarted but haven't had this happen since the Release version.

So far 10.10.2 seems to have sorted things out. Don't forget that correlation does not imply causation, so there are bound to be folks still having issues after the update.

Edit: I also turned on transparency again after a few successful reconnections just to see if I could deliberately cause the fault.

Still many crashes here. But I agree: the more often I use an external display the more the Mac Book Pro (mid 2010) crashes. Still a pain in the ***.

Additionally Chrome and Firefox are crashing frequently.

My MacBook Pro i7 13" was running fine until I upgraded to 10.10.2. When I did, a couple of days ago, I'm not even sure the update finished ok, cause the system restarted and Apple Store hasn't finished loading before the first screen flicker and the system crashes to the login screen. Then, with a complete vanilla Mac, without a single software running, I can't keep my notebook crash free for more than ten minutes.

this is very annoying, It's very hard to work with this and it's a shame every time my colleagues see this happens in a so expensive computer...

The exit-to-login-screen problem has not appeared a single time since I upgraded to 10.10.2. The upgrade seems to have fixed it.

I am now having a far worse problem, getting stuck with a gray screen during boot, that appears to be hardware related or, at least, independent of the boot volume and OSX version. Sometimes it takes 10-15 attempts before the machine will actually get to the login screen, and it seems to boot better when in verbose mode (pressing cmd-V at the chime until the apple appears). I believe that this problem is limited to my 3 year old MBP, and unfortunately it will be a show stopper the day it decides to boot no more. I only mention it here, instead of starting another thread, in case any of you are experiencing the same problem.

Huuuh, I dont think the problem is solved. 15 secs after reading your comment my MBP crashed...

May it be that the crashes come from Adobe Flash? What I see is that whenever I deactivate Flash in my browsers my MBP doesnt crash. But this is probably just a coincidence.

for sure the problem it's not solved, neither with the Combo update...

I will try that, deactivate the flash player and let's see, but that would be a SHAME that such "a powerful OS" can be corrupted y a third party apps...

I do not seem to have seen this issue in sometime. Just running the latest 10.10.2. with all available updates installed.

Despite all my optimism with the 10.10.2 update - the crash to login screen is still there. It certainly has nothing to do with Adobe flash player; I removed it completely and nothing changed. It may, however, as already suggested by several others, be related to the use of external Thunderbolt monitors (I am "oscillating" between several location, where I plug in and plug off external monitors several times a day). Recently, while on business travel with no external monitor connected the phenomenon appeared to be absent - although I didn't really observe stringently. Would this machine need more than 8 GB RAM???