I just added more photos to our gallery section. These are of Halloween 2003, Gung-Gung Tom's visit, and Justin riding mini sports cars.

Justin's speaking more and properly says "mommy" rather than "meemee". His "daddy" has been pretty good for some time now. The other night he said "poo-poo" and he had done just that!

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.