user-bound interface bug - help!

[b0fh666]

This is a *very* strange one.

suddenly, my menus started acting all weird - the 'check marks' and 'arrows' are gone, simply do not display anymore, and when I click, lets say, on the wifi icon it becomes a blue square instead of a blue square with the icon inside like it should. Also, the 'plus', 'minus' and 'gear' icons that show up in lists are also gone - just white squares.

anyway, I created a new user and it works well, so I tried all the following and all failed :

- roll back Library/Preferences to old versions on time machine;
- remove user Library/Preferences and reboot;
- remove entire user directory and reboot (wtf? why did this not work?)

then I booted a few month's old CCC image, and it does not have the problem... so I get brave and copy :

/Library/Preferences
/Library/Application Support
/Users/xxx/Library/Preferences
/Users/xxx/Library/Application Support

from the old CCC image to the HD, and, of course, the problem persists.

tried removing font cache

atsutil -databases -remove / shutdown / ping - no help

so I remove my user directory again and restore from the last time machine backup, really frustrated that I can't fix this thing... all I managed was to revert lots of system-wide configs to old status.

ideas? I don't even know how to google for this issue...

are there configurations for a specific account hidden somewhere in the system other than the folders I messed with?

cheers

 

[b0fh666]

really? no one ever seen this?

anyway, does this sound like a good plan to move the user's stuff to another user, or do I need to use the time machine thing?

sudo su -
cd /Users
cp -a user1 user2

create user2 with sysprefs screen

I have read stuff online that led me to believe this would work (permissions would be fixed when you create user2, but not sure about it)

anyway it will cost me 10 minutes to try that other than I probably need to logoff before copying the stuff over and have work to do... heh

cheers

 

[elchemor]

screenshot the problem

 

[b0fh666]

I can't anymore... long story short I did what is in my previous post (copied the user home dir and create another user), logged in to the new user, everything working fine and dandy, opened the forum, saw your post, went back to the 'bad' user to take a screen shot and it was also working fine again.

as a life-long IT professional, I learned to hate problems that you can't identify the root cause and somehow 'fix' themselves the most... heh

well at least I know what to do if the thing happens again.

apparently, running the same stuff (lots of startup things like profilemenu, flux, smcfancontrol,magicprefs,nosleep,menumeters...) with the same configurations but a different user ID somehow removed whatever corrupt configuration was in place, probably inside the app itself. odd thing is that removing all startup items and logging off/on and even rebooting was also tried and did not work.

wish I knew what the problem was tough.

cheers.