The IT Nerd

What am I talking about? Here’s a picture:

This first appeared AFTER my update to OS X Mountain Lion. I would see it after a restart, but when the product updated itself or I forced an update, one of the icons would disappear. That is, until I restart my Mac. Then the two icons return to the menu bar.

#annoying

I was finally annoyed about it enough that I decided to do something about it today. I did some poking around and I tripped over this inside my login items (that’s located in the System Preferences under Users And Groups):

You’ll note the SophosUIServer item. I found it interesting that this was there and I reasoned that this was the icon in the menu bar. So I clicked the hide option and restarted my Mac. Only one icon popped up. That implied that i didn’t need this as the remaining icon was being put there by some other process. I did note that after I upgraded to OS X Mountain Lion, Sophos did a major update and the application was basically reinstalled. Thus I have to conclude that the version that was running on my Mac (8.0.6c for those who want to know what version that I have on my Mac) didn’t need this. So I highlighted the SophosUIServer entry in Login Items used the minus sign to remove it. I also took the opportunity to clean up the items that were orphaned (that’s what the yellow exclamation mark means). In my case, that meant removing WeatherEyeMac (it was an orphan when the application became WeatherEye due to a update to the application), JawboneUpdater (no longer on my computer), and gfxCardStatus (a duplicate entry due to an update to that application). I also noted that iTunesHelper was in the same state, which was strange as I still had iTunes on my computer. So I did this with the Login Items window open:

1. I deleted iTunesHelper from the Login Items as it clearly was not working.
2. I then found iTunes in my Applications folder.
3. I then right clicked on the iTunes application and chose Open Package Contents
4. I then opened the macos folder and dragged the iTunesHelper app into the Login Items window

That fixed that issue. I closed everything and restarted. On the restart everything worked perfectly. Not only that, but the menu items appeared way faster. So this was clearly a good thing to do. You may want to check to see if you have orphaned items in your Login Items as removing them seems to speed up the start up process of a Mac.

By the way, I should mention what iTunesHelper does. It’s a small application that opens up iTunes when you plug in an iPod or iPhone into your Mac. I confirmed that this was working properly by plugging in an old iPod Nano I had lying around.

This entry was posted on September 16, 2012 at 9:44 pm and is filed under Tips with tags Apple, Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.