SITUATION
Freshly-installed (Erase & Install option) Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) on PowerBook G4 17" (European languages deselected for installation; Asian languages included)
ISSUE
Just after reboot and completion of registration and setup wizard, all menu bar icons (date and time, battery status, AirPort status, Bluetooth status) are missing.
Logging in as another user does not help.
Moving /Library/Preferences folder to the desktop and rebooting does not help.
Hard disk format with zero data option and reinstall of Panther from scratch does not help.
Booting off an external FireWire hard disk containing a Panther backup (using Carbon Copy Cloner 2.3) of another PowerBook is alright — menu bar icons are there as normal.
AppleCare support stated that others have had same problem but could not offer any solution or suggestions other than the troubleshooting steps I had already taken. They said that hopefully the next OS update would fix the problem.
SOLUTION
Try adjusting the Dock Size in Apple => System Preferences => Dock. My colleague and I think that after we did that, the icons magically appeared in the menu bar. Yes, incredible that this seemed to work even when reformatting with the zero all data option and reinstalling from scratch did not help. Very strange.
Posted by derek at November 25, 2003 10:50 PMMakes you wonder if all formating is the same, does it not?
Posted by: Blaine Hilton on November 25, 2003 11:27 PMHa! Yeah, sure does. But erasing takes only a few seconds while formatting with the zero all data option takes at least an hour. AppleCare support could only suggest that as a possible fix, given what I had already tried. I have heard that that formatting option helps with some folks who had trouble cloning disks using Carbon Copy Cloner.
Cheers,
Derek
I had the same issue, after i tried toconnect my phone with IRDA with isyc. It doesnt work, cause I have the wrong handy. Now I connect my siemens handy with may old program gsm remote. Now the menu bar items come in front again.
Turn off the IRDA monitor in the menu bar. The irda menu bar item seems to cause a problem if irda is on.
YMMV
Scott
Posted by: scott on January 27, 2004 11:10 AMMy problem is that the menu bars intermittently function. All of the icons are there, but clicking on them does nothing; this is particularly frustrating when trying to stuff files using the menu bar facility. Any ideas?
Posted by: Jack Suben on February 5, 2004 5:47 AM