Menu items grayed out in Messages.

Most menu items are grayed out in Messages: can't access preferences or account, among others. Just upgraded to Yosemite on Mid2010 Mac Pro.

Okay, just by posting this request, I was finally directed to some more similar discussions that I couldn't find earlier. Buried within numerous, numerous suggestions to this issue, I finally found one I hadn't tried - booting briefly into Safe Mode, then restarting. For some utterly ridiculous reason, that appears to have solved the problem when nothing else would.
So thanks, community, for finding the answer before I asked.

Similar Messages

Black screen & all menu items grayed out -help!

Sorry folks, total AE nube here, in over my head already. Having just purchased AE CS3 I'm completely adrift.
I was in the process of looking at & changing preferences when shortly thereafter my screen went All black. A friend suggested it may have something to do with the output display, which may be the problem, however, I have gievn up searching after 4 days trying different searches in the program help function with no joy.
Apparently, I don't know "Adobe Speak" well enough to phrase the seach to get meaningful results. I did finally find that If I put the cursor at the very top of the screen & click I can then see the menu. Every dropdown list in the menu, is grayed out and no amount of pounding on the keys, gnashing of teeth, pulling hair, etc will allow me back in to the preferences where I suspect I misunderstood what the selection of "Cinema display" would do. Unfortunate that FCP 7 allows one to select that for a higher resolution view that I have in fact used before.
If that was indeed my error, since even the preferences are grayed out, how does one reset preferences to factory default?
OR
Is this a problem of a different nature? The monitor works just fine in all other programs, so I don't bevieve that is the problem.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Ken

Well,
I just don't know why I keep buying this Adobe crap. Apparently, they must outsource all the programming to China, because it sure isn't written in a way that I can understand as an American. Like most of the big software companies, they do not provide either a clear path to or a coherent explanation of how to use the arcane & obtuse programming that makes up their fare. Of course, you never really know what you are getting into, because they don't make it clear just how difficult it is to learn or use.
In their rush to make gobs of money, they seem to have forgotten that not everyone who purchases their crap has had enough prior experience to undestand the little known secrets of how to find out what to do when all goes wrong.
It is the same mistake that many programmers the world over make day in & day out, they can't concieve that those who have no familiarity with the way they see how to make their software work, find their software unfathomable. THE NEWS FLASH IS THAT NOT EVERY ONE KNOWS WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT HOW TO MAKE SOFTWARE WORK. The attitude seems to be: "Anyone who doesn't know the secrets of the brotherhood shouldn't be using it!"
As one who once went through the rigors of obtaining a CS degree (and actually considered starting a software company), it became obvious (20 years ago) that the future was not how many tricks you could make the pony do, but rather how intuitive you could make the software to allow the intended user to operate it without having to know it's arcane secrets AND to make it fault tolerant and self healing as much as possible. The telephone is a reasonable analogy, very few people know how it works, but they sure can use it until the cows come home with very few operator errors. In short, the technology is virtually transparent to the user.
I realize that company cultures rarely change unless an outsider is brought in to clean house and start afresh and that the likelyhood of that happening at Adobe is about the same as winning the Powerball lotto Jackpot 3 times in your life. I guess that makes me a modern day Don Quixote, but so be it. I also know that EVERY organization that does not change it's approach to the marketplace will eventually be replaced by some upstart who figures out a way to do it better.
So, ladies & germs, I did what anyone who uses a telephone would do when you aren't making any progress, I hung up the phone (un-installed the program) and stopped trying to figure out the technology that keeps my screen black AND does not allow me to undo the prefs quickly, and with a new dialtone, I redialed the number (re-installed). A clever little monkey am I.
If it happens again (or something similar) I'll bring my disk and man's best friend to the park for a stress bustin game of frisbee!
Adobe, it really is the 21st century, and you have failed miserably at meeting the future of making software more transparent to the user !
Ken
P.S. - For the record, I've been in an altered state (call frustration) for 20 years worth of Adobe products, and the light at the end of their tunnel, IMO is an oncoming train.

ITunes menu items grayed out

I've had this happen with previous versions of iTunes and now with the most recent version of iTunes (running OS 10.7.2) all the iTunes Menu items are all grayed out, as well as all the other iTunes menues, with less than a hand full of commands availabe. Since the Quit iTunes is one of the options grayed out I've had to force quit iTunes and even after a relaunch the menu items continue to be grayed out. In search the Apple Communities for this subject I found references to this problem going back to 2008 and no one has offered a solution. One of the suggestions was to run Disk Utility and repair permissions, which I have done and it didn't solve the problem, but I hadn't restarted iTunes which I again did by force quitting, and on relaunch all the options are back working as they should. Not sure if repairing the permissions had any effect on iTunes as none of iTunes permissions were repaired, just scanner and printer permissions.

I have this same problem and it's very annoying.
What happens is this: I'll be happily editing my library when, after an edit, it suddenly becomes impossible to select "Get Info" to edit tracks. The menu item is grayed out and Command-I just gives a warning beep.
At this point, it is also impossible to Quit iTunes as that menu item is also grayed out and Command-Q also gives a warning beep.
One thing I have found is that I can still quit iTunes by right-clicking on the dock icon, obviating the need for a force quit.
Another symptom: the iTunes dock icon is constantly jumping up for things that it didn't used to jump for.
I've tried deleting the preference file. I haven't tried moving the library and library.xml files and rebuilding them, mostly because I've got 380GB of music on an Airdisk and it would take an eternity to rebuild the library.
I'm really fed up with this and have no idea what to do.
For what it's worth, the behavior started on my old machine running Snow Leopard and has continued after a clean install (albeit with iTunes information copied over) on a new machine running Lion (now 10.7.3).

Premiere Elements 8 new install - all menu items grayed out

New install of premiere elements 8. Installed 8.0.1 patch successfully. Installed Quicktime.
SYSTEM
Windows 7 64-bit
Dell Inspiron 660
8 GB RAM
1 TB hard drive, 700 GB available after install
All menu items are greyed out except for File | New, Open, Exit and some Help menu items. Will create a project but then does nothing. Reopening the empty project results in Elements/Pro compatibility message. Unusable.

Thank you ATR. I followed your sequence of checks. RESOLVED BY DISABLING PORTION OF AV FUNCTIONS BEFORE LAUNCHING APPLICATION. Here are the steps.
I had not even tried Premiere Elements Organizer. When I did, it appeared to run fine and actually the AutoAnalyzer Options only appear under its Preferences menu, I later found out. Those options were then disabled with no change to the issue.
I removed and reinstalled the program with an internet connection and McAfee firewall and AV off. And then ran the program with an internet connection. No change.
I deleted the Adobe Premiere Elements Prefs file first, and then the whole 8.0 Folder in which the Adobe Premiere Elements Prefs file exists. No change.
The program was installed in the default c: drive location so no change there.
The problem went away with antivirus and firewall(s) disabled!. I narrowed it down to what McAfee calls "Real-Time Scanning" under "Virus and Spyware Protection." The level of control McAfee LiveSafe-Internet Security affords under "Real-Time Scanning" is not very detailed. The setting that makes the difference is under "Scan These Files" is "Programs and documents only" instead of the default "All files (Recommended)."
Now going back upstream, I enabled the firewall fully. Firewall makes no difference if I shut it off globally or allow individual program exceptions...it still runs fine. I also enabled all the AutoAnalyzer Options and program still runs fine. Perhaps this is a rabbit trail for non-resource-limited systems.
Hopefully this helps others with the same problem.
sf

Photoshop Elements 4 menu items grayed out after opening from iPhoto

Hi,
I just set PSE4 as my preferred photo editor in the General Preferences pane of iPhoto '08. When I edit a photo in iPhoto, PSE4 boots up (as expected and desired); however, all the menu items are inexplicably grayed out now in PSE4, so doing any editing is impossible unless keystrokes are used. Unfortunately, I don't know what all the keystrokes are for various functions, if keystrokes exist for each... Does anyone know anything about this? Gurus, please help! Advance thanks.

Heheh: the inexplicable mysteries of the digital universe. Opening PSE4 up first, and then editing the photos in iPhoto so they appear in PSE4 worked! The menu items were no longer grayed out - all functional. Thanks Terence!

Why are all menu items grayed out?

I just opened iWeb 6 for the first time and all my menu items are grayed out except for a few things like Page Setup. Why is this happening? I looked in the Help and Getting Started but couldn't find anything that seemed to fit. I don't have an .mac account as I have web space on campus to use. Does that matter?
Thanks.
Anne

If you are talking about iWeb '06 you need to got to the appropriate forum at....
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1108

All menu items grayed out

Sometimes after rendering, and sometimes after exporting to QT, all the menu items are grayed out, including Quit, Save, etc. I can quit from the Dock and restart FCE 2.0.3, and everything is normal again. What's happening?

I have not lost anything (yet), but it is annoying to have to quit to get everything back again.
Thanks for the reference to the other posts, at least I'm not alone.
Perhaps the OS X 10.3.4 update released today will fix it? We'll see...

Product Menu items grayed out in Xcode

I am a beginner in Xcode, I was working on a tutorial material with a basic calculator project and when I added an icon file to the project the Run or any of the Product Menu options got grayed out. Previous to this change everything was running and building fine. Can anybody advice on how to get the Run option to be available again? My guess is that I did something wrong at the time of adding the new icon file to the project but I cannot figure out what was it.
I don't want to start all over.
Thanks,
Mario

Mark:
Thanks for the reply, I tried all options mentioned and nothing worked thou. What I decided to do is to use my timemachine backup and used the closest version to the last time the project ran properly, now I only have to re do just a portion of the project.

Photoshop CS3 10.0.1 - Launch hangs on Registration Screen, All menu items grayed out

I'm using Adobe Photoshop CS3 10.0.1.
When launching, the window labeled "Adobe Design Suite Premium CS3" opens - it's only filled with white, and no text or graphics (I think it's usually the window asking me if I want to register, which always comes up when I launch the program (rather annoying in itself). However, now it seems that the launch gets "hung" on this window, as, even the the program starts, all the menus are grayed out, and I can't open any files or do anything. Also, the window mentioned above only has the yellow "minimize" button available in the top left corner, so I can't close it or otherwise get rid of it. Since even the Quit function is grayed out, I have to quit the program with a force quit. Also, this same thing happens in my other CS3 programs (In Design) as well.
I tried trashing the photoshop plist file (com.adobe.photoshop.plist) and also the com.adobe.118.registration file, which had no effect.
Any advice on how I can fix this?
Thanks!

Hopefully this solution will work for you:
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1339100?tstart=30

Insert from scanner - all menu items grayed out (Acrobat XI)

I can create documents from the scanner (e.g. Edit > Create > PDF from Scanner), but I cannot insert pages directly from the scanner (e.g. Tools > More Insert Options > Insert from Scanner). Any suggestions why that might be the case?
I am running Version 11.0.6 on Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1. The scanner is an HP OfficeJetPro 8500A Plus on my wired LAN.

I answered my own question. The document into which I was trying to insert a scanned page was signed.

I'm using an iMac running Os X Yosemite, Photoshop CS5 Extended, R2880 Epson printer In the Print Settings dialog box, I can't select Color, Advanced BW or Grayscale unless I select "Printer Manages Color". The pull down menu is grayed out. Even with "pr

I’m using an iMac running Os X Yosemite, Photoshop CS5 Extended, R2880 Epson printer In the Print Settings dialog box, I can’t select Color, Advanced BW or Grayscale unless I select “Printer Manages Color”. The pull down menu is grayed out. Even with “printer manages color” the tif or jpg image comes out in color overlaid with black. (See example - printer1. image on left is close to what it should be). Photoshop has no updates pending. I’ve downloaded the latest Epson driver which was working fine just before the problem occurred

Is your Photoshop CS5 updated to 12.1?
Are you on Yosemite 10.10.1 or Yosemite 10.10.2?
Did you apply the recent Epson software 2.1.9 update?
What type of file is it (file format)? What bit depth and what color space?
BOILERPLATE TEXT:
Note that this is boilerplate text.
If you give complete and detailed information about your setup and the issue at hand,
such as your platform (Mac or Win),
exact versions of your OS, of Photoshop (not just "CS6", but something like CS6v.13.0.6) and of Bridge,
your settings in Photoshop > Preference > Performance
the type of file you were working on,
machine specs, such as total installed RAM, scratch file HDs, total available HD space, video card specs, including total VRAM installed,
what troubleshooting steps you have taken so far,
what error message(s) you receive,
if having issues opening raw files also the exact camera make and model that generated them,
if you're having printing issues, indicate the exact make and model of your printer, paper size, image dimensions in pixels (so many pixels wide by so many pixels high). if going through a RIP, specify that too.
etc.,
someone may be able to help you (not necessarily this poster, who is not a Windows user).
a screen shot of your settings or of the image could be very helpful too.
Please read this FAQ for advice on how to ask your questions correctly for quicker and better answers:
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/419981?tstart=0
Thanks!

Choose signature drop-down menu is grayed out

I know how to set up a signature for email; however, the "Choose Signature" drop-down menu is grayed out. I even put in several signatures thinking it needed more than one to choose from, but it is still grayed out. So I cannot choose a signature and thus my email does not have one.
+Choose Signature+
+Select a signature to appear in messages for the selected account. You can also choose to use all of the signatures in sequential or random order+
So that option does not appear to be available.
Any suggestions?

Ah, I was just clicking on the + to add one, since I only have one email account.. As soon as I did as you mentioned, and THEN clicked on the + it added Signature 2, and that one works. I now have a signature in the email.
Thank you VERY much!!!

Ps will no longer print, Print on menu is grayed out

Ps (CS5) will no longer print, Print on menu is grayed out
Have found many discussions about this but no solutions that work in my case.
I tried changing printers, did not work.
I tried changing whether Ps or printer manages color - cannot find that setting except when the Print dialog shows up... and of course it does not show.
For my Adobe PDF printer I tried changing various settings, nothing made a difference.
Must I reinstall Photoshopj?

Ps (CS5) will no longer print, Print on menu is grayed out
Have found many discussions about this but no solutions that work in my case.
I tried changing printers, did not work.
I tried changing whether Ps or printer manages color - cannot find that setting except when the Print dialog shows up... and of course it does not show.
For my Adobe PDF printer I tried changing various settings, nothing made a difference.
Must I reinstall Photoshopj?

Why do I have to File Save twice before the Save menu is grayed out?

Open a file into Photoshop CC
Add a Levels layer
Click File>Save
The Save menu is still available when you click File. Doing another File>Save make the Save menu become grayed out (like it should the first time).
System info:
Adobe Photoshop Version: 2014.2.1 20141014.r.257 2014/10/14:23:59:59 CL 987299 x64
Operating System: Mac OS 10.10.1 (the problem has occurred since Mac OS 10.8.x)
Thanks for any help.
Daniel

I have OSX 10.10.1 and CC 2014.
So I will open a PSD with an adjustment layer.
I turn off and on the "eyeball" in the layers panel. It counts as a change.
If you look at your document tab, you see a star at the end of the filename. It shows you made changes to the file.
File > Save would remove that star and File > Save does dim on my Macbook.
If you are seeing it twice, the Preferences file may be corrupt. I suggest a reset.
Macintosh - CMD-SHIFT-OPTION immediately after you double-click the PS icon.
If that doesn't work uninstall/reinstall CC 2014 and updates'
Let me know how it went and mark the answer correct only if this solved your problem.
Gene

CS4-menu items greyed out ????

Why are my menu items greyed out until I hit a tool icon?
Example .....open Photoshop, click "FILE" = everything greyed out except "recent" whose submenu (list of recent files) greyed out. If I hit any tool icon, menu items appear.
ALSO .....eyes on layers have no effect ubtil I click elsewhere, navigator panel empty until I click an increase or decrease there, etc. I need to always click elsewhere for something to happen.
I am running Vista Ultimate with a high capacity video card. I removed all my plug-ins, I ran PS4 script-cleaner and re-installed applic 3 times - same damn problem.
Any ideas .....please?
Thank you.

Try resetting your preferences as described in the FAQ.
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/375776?tstart=0
You either have to physically delete (or rename) the preference files or, if using the Alt, Ctrl, and Shift method, be sure that you get a confirmation dialog.
This resets all settings in Photoshop to factory defaults.
(A complete uninstall/re-install will not affect the preferences and a corrupt file there may be causing the problem.)

Menu items grayed out in Messages.

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