Desktop Startup Delay?? :???:

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dave marshdave marsh
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
Hi all. :: One on my users at work is having a significant delay after logging into her account and before the desktop finishes loading the dock, top menu bar, and desktop icons. The spinning beach-ball spins up to 30 seconds while something is happening in the background. There's nothing set to startup in her account following login, including no antivirus or file saver background applications. Also, this machine boots up quickly leading up to the login screen (~13 spins).



This machine is a 700MHz eMac with 768MB of RAM. This machine has recently been upgraded to 10.3.8, and fully defragmented (using iDefrag). If I log into the Administrator account, its dock, menu bar and desktop icons load within 5-10 seconds, with virtually no beach-ball activity. The problem seems to be localized specifically to her Finder desktop area. Her desktop is clean except for the Macintosh HD icon and dock. The dock only has the standard icons plus Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and her Mail client.



Since I'm sure there's no special background apps starting up when she logs in, I'm left to wonder if there's a cache that is being read that may be corrupted that's delaying everything. Does anyone have any idea what the names of the caches are that may be involved following the login process? Even though I'm sure the caches aren't fragmented (the problem persisted both before and after defragmenting), they may be damaged, and I'd like to delete them to force the OS to rebuild them.



I'm really quite puzzled at this point, since there's no delay at all when logging into the only other account on this machine (Administrator). I don't really want to create a new account for her and move all her data over to it just to fix this issue, but will if I have to.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 5
    ebbyebby Posts: 3,110member
    You can use OnyX to delete the caches. Try running a quick "repair permissions" too.
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  • Reply 2 of 5
    progmacprogmac Posts: 1,850member
    if my computer has trouble figuring out its network situation, sometimes it will spin and spin and spin just as you described. maybe this has something to do with it?
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  • Reply 3 of 5
    dave marshdave marsh Posts: 355member
    Thanks for the options. I've repaired permissions at least twice, and a network issue would affect both accounts on this Mac. The Administrator account has no such delay. Even after logging out of her account and immediately back in has a delay, although not quite as log.



    I'll check out Onyx to see if it will delete the caches.
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  • Reply 4 of 5
    jake bulletjake bullet Posts: 49member
    It might be worth checking for a corrupt file being cached as a desktop picture.
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  • Reply 5 of 5
    dave marshdave marsh Posts: 355member
    At the MacRumors forum someone suggested the fonts cache might be the problem so I followed this advice:



    "You can do this manually by finding and removing these files:

    In /System/Library/Caches:

    fontTablesAnnex

    (fontTablesAnnex contains the character encodings/mappings for all of the fonts on your system. Information in this file can lead to garbled text.)

    com.apple.ATS.System.fcache

    com.apple.ATSServer.FODB_System

    In /Library/Caches:

    com.apple.ATS

    In your home directory?s Library/Preferences folder:

    com.apple.ATS.plist



    In my case, the problem was solved by trashing /System/Library/Caches/fontTablesAnnex. None of these cache files are essential, however, so I deleted them all. (The ?com.apple.ATS.plist? prefs file, on the other hand, tracks, among other things, the disabled fonts you?ve specified using Font Book. I left this in place.)"



    This solved my problem. Thanks for the feedback, people.
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