Hard Drives not sleeping SystemUIServer Hangs

Question

I have been having problems with SystemUIServer “Hanging” when I used either my scanner or digital card reader which are both connected via FireWire. USB devices didn’t do this. You could see that it was Hanging in the Activity Monitor window. I was told that it was probably one of the apps that I run in the menu bar, and to uninstall them individually, and restart, to see which one was responsible. After doing this procedure SystemUIServer would still “Hang” so I was unable to resolve this problem.
Unfortunately, after reinstalling all the apps that had been removed I noticed that the two additional hard drives that I have installed which normally spin down, or sleep when not in use, were no longer doing that when I ran my browser, Firefox, and/or another app called OSXplanet. The drives just continued to run even though they were not in use. I spent almost two months tinkering trying to determine why these additional internal hard drives were not going to sleep when I ran these programs. One drive was for OS 9.2 only so it had nothing to do with the normal operation of OS X.3. I finally stumbled upon a description of what happens when you startup in Safe Mode, or Safe Boot, which only loads the basic programs of OS X. I tried starting up in Safe Mode and both hard drives spun down when either Firefox and/or OSXplanet were running.
I then took select screen shots (Shift-Command-4) of the Activity Monitor window with the Process Name selected in the window after a normal startup, and after starting up in Safe Mode. To select the Process Name just click on it. You can’t Save the Activity Monitor as it just gives you a plist. I compared the screen shots and found five apps that were not running during Safe Mode. I Googled each one to see what I could learn, and found a couple that were installed by Norton Utilities. I used Find in Panther to locate the apps in their respective folders. After removing something called DTDaemon, and restarting, the hard drives would go to sleep so I trashed those two items that were related to Norton, and uninstalled everything else using Norton’s Uninstaller v1.0.2. You have to be careful when pulling items out like this because you can easily remove something that can break OS X, but that’s why you check to see what each item is before removing it using Google.
Yet, after doing that, when I would use Command-O to open a document in say Appleworks, or just start Adobe Photoshop 7.0, the two additional hd’s would spin up and not go back to sleep. I had to restart to get the drives to sleep again. When I used Command-O the window would open and the selection would start with the computer’s name which opened to all three hard drives and Network. To see if there was some extension that was still affecting this I again did a Safe Boot by holding the Shift key down immediately after the startup chime. After booting into Safe Mode the hard drives did not spin up and continued to sleep when I used Commnad-O, or started Adobe Photoshop, so I restarted in normal mode. After performing this procedure the drives no longer start spinning when I use Command-O to open a document, or when I started Adobe Photoshop 7.0. Any ideas on what happened the second time I used Safe Mode to startup in? Supposedly there are repairs made when you do a Safe Boot, and I would love to know what. Hopefully this will solve someone else’s problem too. Also, any ideas on how to resolve the SystemUIServer “Hanging” whenever I use a FireWire device? I’m getting tired of Force Quitting SystemUIServer everytime I use my scanner or transfer pictures.
G4 Quicksilver Dual 1 GHz, 1.5 GB RAM, Sonnet ATA133 card, Maxtor ATA133 HD's   Mac OS X (10.3.9)   B+W G3 450 MHz, OS 9.2.2, 1 GB RAM

Answer 1

You have certainly done a lot of good debugging and I am sure that these problems have been quite vexing. Regarding the Safe Boot, you have probably seen Apple's article on What is Safe Boot, Safe Mode?. The repair function that a Safe Boot does is to run a unix program (fsck) which attempts to repair the filesystem's directory structure. The directory structure is the mechanism that tells the operating system where files begin and end on the harddrive. It is conceivable that the 2nd Safe Boot repaired a problem that had cropped up, although I am not totally convinced of that.
Regarding the systemuiserver hanging with firewire devices, I have seen a number of posts on such issues but there does not appear to be a lot of information about how fixes, if they exist.
One more troubleshooting step that I will suggest is that you look in your console.log file to see if there are messages issued at the time that the hangs occur. One way to do this is to start the Console app from the Utilities menu. Make sure that the console.log file opens - if not, select it with the logs icon at the upper left of the Console app's window. Then, do something to cause the Systemuiserver to hang. See if something is printed to the console.log file. If nothing shows up, select the system.log file and repeat the process. If you get any messages, please report them here and perhaps someone will be able to interpret them.
EMAC G4 1.0 GHz   Mac OS X (10.4.6)