Finder toolbar flashing

Question

Hi
I'm a long time Apple user for it's dheer simplicity and therefore although I've been using for 8 years (makes it sound like a habit) anything more complex than following the "press here then press here" I get confused
This is more of a niggle than a major problem but it's been driving me mad for about 2 months
I was on 10.3.8, and upgraded to 10.3.9 and in the same restart moved from Norton AntiVirus 8 to NAV 9. Since then the icons in the top right corner (i.e. airport, bluetooth, VPN, clock etc) come on as I reboot but then flash off and go through then appear in sequence as if they were rebooting again. This goes on continuously throughout it's usage.
I can still use airport through internet connect and bluetooth through preferences etc.
So far I've tried uninstalling NAV9, disk utility repair, Norton Disk doctor, Yesterday I went out and bought 10.4 (about time) installed last night and updated to 10.4.7 and it still does the same. Again ran DU, Disk Doctor using Powerbook as a target disk from my Emac, but still no change.
Apart from wiping the whole machine (which I don't want to do with 2 years of work, links and all that) and starting all over again is there anything else I can do
many thanks
David

Answer 1

I had similar issues in the past. At one point, when I ran into further problems (Finder crashing all the time), I reinstalled the OS. I'm not saying that you need to do this. You can just create a new account, and move everything over to that account, it seems.
What I was seeing was:
Fast User Switching icon would disappear after being told to stay in the menu bar.
Airport would ask me for my wireless password every time I connected to my network.
These both went away when I reinstalled the OS. Now, everything is fine. Maybe try using the new account you created. You could even (1) create a new account, (2) delete you old account - BUT SAVE THE ACCOUNT'S USER FOLDER WHEN ASKED, (3) rename your old account's user folder to something else, (4) create another new account, using your old user name, and (5) move what you want from the old user account folder - that you renamed - into the newest user account folder - that is named the same as the original folder.
In the last step, I say, "move what you want", because you probably want to only move iTunes, iPhoto, Documents, etc. files to the new account. Your preferences are probably corrupted somewhere, and you don't want to just drag everything over to the new account, because the same problems might re-appear there, being that this is an account-specific problem.
The steps above should give you a new account with the same name as the original one, if you have an affection for the old account name. If you don't care about the account name, just create a new account (you already have) and use it from now on. Be very careful with permissions. Make sure the two new accounts are both admins. Be sure to repair permissions (via Disk Utility) when done all this, just to be safe.
Hope this helps.