[DeathMan]

Its been on and off, but its driving me to the funny farm. When I hit Command-Spacebar, I lose focus on whatever I'm typing, The dashboard menuling goes inverted, but I get no sheet (or whatever you would call that). If I type anyway and hit enter, spotlight sometimes still works normally, and pulls up the spotlight results window (which I think should be a finder window, so it persists after you open something and it turns out to be wrong, but thats just personal preference).

Anyone know what is going on here with this Magical Mystery Dialogue?

[DigitalEl]

Found this old thread through a search.

I'm now getting this, but only since 10.4.4. Only difference is Spotlight isn't working for me at all when using CMD+Spacebar. If I use Shift+CMD+Spacebar, I get the Finder window version and that works... But the upper right Menuling doesn't work anymore.

Anyone else? Any solutions?

[Chuckit]

Have you tried control-space? There's an odd conflict for command-space between two different parts of the system as well as some applications.

[JKT]

Prior to 10.4.x command-space was used by the International Input Menu to switch keyboards. Go to System Preferences>International>Input Menu to see if it has been reset and then choose the Keyboard Shortcuts... option to alter either the Spotlight shortcuts or the Input Menu shortcuts:

[JKT]

Actually, I just tried mine now and I have a problem too, pressing control-space (my shortcut for Spotlight) leads to the blue highlight appearing, but no drop down. Console.log has this in it when I do... obviously something is borked:

2006-01-13 11:25:02.236 SystemUIServer[271] windowPoint is {46, 0}, windowFrame is {{-46, 0}, {46, 22}}
2006-01-13 11:25:02.236 SystemUIServer[271] screen is <NSScreen: 0x368e10>, screenFrame is {{0, 0}, {1280, 854}}
2006-01-13 11:25:02.238 SystemUIServer[271] -[MDMenuWindow _checkTopRight] the window is off the screen topRight point is {-13, 0}
2006-01-13 11:25:02.238 SystemUIServer[271] -[MDMenuWindow _checkTopRight] the window is off the screen topRight point is {-13, 0}

[JKT]

Must be a bug. What is happening is that the menu is appearing off screen. If you use your keyboard shortcut to activate the Spotlight menu, you can actually still type a search and press enter to bring up the search window...

Once you have done this though, what you can't do is click the Spotlight icon any longer to start a search.

[DigitalEl]

Definitely a bug. I had already figured the keyboard conflict and resolved that. Haven't yet found a fix.

[TETENAL]

Try trashing the preferences of the SystemUIServer.

[JKT]

Thanks TETENAL, did the trick. Looking at the old .plist (to work out which menu items I had installed after the reset so I could restore them) before I trashed it, for some reason I had four entries for the CPU.item even though I had removed it some time ago. Very odd.

[DigitalEl]

Trashed the SystemUIServer .plists (there were 2) and logged out. That did NOT work. Will try it and reboot when home from work early Saturday.

For the record, this bug is not duplicated on my 12" PowerBook.

[DigitalEl]

Figured I'd bump this thread as it's been well over a month. The bug is still there for me and I hesitate to reinstall the OS just for this stupid problem. I've gone back to using CMD+Spacebar for LaunchBar until a fix is found.

Other than trashing the SystemUIServer .plist(s), has anyone else found a solution for this?

[JKT]

FWIW, it hasn't recurred for me, so the .plist deletion fixed it permanently.

Did you try another user account as a test to see if the problem occurs there?