Launchpad & Mission control Issues at Startup

I've just installed a clean copy of Lion on my Macbook Pro, and I'm having some very annoying exposé problems.
Disabling automatic login fixes this problem, but I would really like to keep it enabled.
If I go to activity monitor and kill the Dock process, everything works fine again, but obviously I don't want to do this every time I start my computer...
With launchpad, the background isn't blurred like it should be:
Mission control is much more troubling because it's completely invisible:

Phoned AppleCare tonight - the fix was to nuke the System Preferences preference file and reboot.
The good news - 'Zoom' now works with the keyboard shortcuts.
The bad news - the trackpad 'zoom' gesture from Snow Leopard doesn't work in Lion.

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Accessability/Universal Access - Zoom does not work in Launchpad/Mission control

If using the Accessability 'Zoom' option it works normally in 'normal' desktop Spaces.
On entering either LaunchPad or Mission Control it is not possible to zoom in or, more importantly, zoom back out to full screen.
It is also not possible to move the zoomed area around the full desktop.
These issues make LaunchPad and Mission Control unusable if entered with any amount of Zoom enabled.
The workaround appears to be to leave LaunchPad or Mission Control, Zoom fully out and go back in again.
This is not helpful if you need the zoom mode in order to be able to see your computer screen.
Anyone found a better workaround?

Phoned AppleCare tonight - the fix was to nuke the System Preferences preference file and reboot.
The good news - 'Zoom' now works with the keyboard shortcuts.
The bad news - the trackpad 'zoom' gesture from Snow Leopard doesn't work in Lion.

Blinking gray desktop background and no dock/launchpad/mission control

I just updated to Mountain Lion and my desktop background keeps changing from the picture to a gray screen. My dock also wont appear on the bottom of my screen and launch pad and mission control also do not work. I called Apple once and I reinstalled ML once already and its still doing it. Any suggestions?

reboot, hold CMD+R .
you'll be in the recovery partition.
go to disk utility, and Verify and Repair your boot disk and its permissions.
exit out of Disk Utility and then go to the area that says reinstall Mountain Lion.
Do so.
This will hopefully fix your issues.

How can I fix Dock/Mission Control/Launchpad? (Glitch)

General Description
Mission Control and Launchpad glitch when invoked (whether by using the mouse or trackpad gesture). They seems to crash or quit, and then relaunch themselves (/itself - all the same app?), I know this because:
they both, as well as Dock, become unresponsive;
the desktop background images disappear temporarily (being replaced by blank light or dark grey);
the Mission Control animation stops/freezes and does not execute properly (the windows stay still);
Dock becomes unresponsive as well as Launchpad.
This happens a lot (every other invokation) and seems to be random; it's annoying and is ruining my workflow, since I am a heavy user of multiple desktops.
Behaviour
I usually have over ten desktops, all with active apps open at one time; when it glitches I can't even open or switch applications, though I can use the ones that are on the current desktop (if was trying to use Mission Control).
There is no correlation with the glitch and the amount of applications open, or how much RAM or CPU is active (still happens with only a few light apps open and a few desktops).
It does not matter whether I am using more than one monitor, the glitch still occurs.
It does not happen due to a particular open application, as I have tested with nothing open at all straight after a restart.
Possible and tested causes
An application might be corrupting the glitchy app(s), since the disk breaks after being repaired in Safe Boot mode. Once the disk has been repaired, the glitch doesn't seem to occur until a few applications have been opened, though I haven't tested this much. (I am suspecting TheBrain, but not sure. Other potential culprits: Chrome, Mail, Firefox, Spotify, Skype, Dictionary, Activity Monitor, Finder).
It isn't the operating system itself because I have reinstalled it from Safe Boot mode, and yet the glitch persists.
The application(s) affected by the glitch may be corrupted, and need reinstalled - that is, if they weren't already by reinstalling the operating system (they are in the '/System/CoreServices' folder).
Not-so-possible:
I doubt it is a virus - it would be a pretty pointless glitch for one to cause.
I have Time Machine running most of the time, but I have no reason to believe that is the cause.
I am using a NEET mini display port to HDMI adapter for my second monitor (no idea how that could be causing the issue).
Help
Any ideas on what I could do to fix this?
And does anyone know how to reinstall Mission Control, Dock and Launchpad (I think they are all part of '/System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app')? This might be worth a try.
Specifications (just in case)
2010 Macbook Pro
2.8 GHz Intel i7
8 GB memory
500 GB HD (two thirds full)
Thanks for any help!

One thing I'd like for you to try: Create a new user account. Log into the new account and see if the same problems persist.
Many times such crashes are the result of corrupted preference or cache files. The above will eliminate these in the user account but not at the system level. So, I suggest you use a utility such as Lion Cache Cleaner 6.0.11 or Purity 1.10 to clear out cache files at the system level. I've never used the latter software but I, personally, use the former one on my computers.

My mac's desktop is gray, the dock wont show up, nor mission control or launchpad work. What should I do

I recently logged in to my mac and while the finder relaunched it got frozen and is now gray. The dock does not show up or work. The launchpad doesnt work nor does mission control. I can only open applications from a finder window. The apps dont even work in fullscreen. Ive tried restarting it, logging in to another account, and booting in safe mode. None work. I will try to move my things to my other computer for the time.
What should I do?

Run through this list of fixes, if your getting in do #9 as soon as possible.
Step by Step to fix your Mac

MISSION CONTROL, LAUNCHPAD, and FULL SCREEN APPS (one month later)

I'm pretty good embracing a new thing when it comes along. I downloaded LION the day it come out, which was over a month ago at this point. On that day, I immediately found MISSION CONTROL and LAUNCHPAD both uninituitve and pointless. Unhandy iCandy. And of FULL SCREEN APPS? Not necessary on an iMac anyway.
So I quickly sought out quick solutions to 'fix' these new features. Launchpad and full screen apps have the advantage that they can be simply ignored. This is a good thing. Mission Control, on the other hand, got in the way of a beloved feature for me: what was once SPACES and EXPOSE. That is, I couldn't simply ignore MC because I still needed the previous helpful features in Snow Leopard.
My solution was kind of surprising and eye-opening. It's complicated to explain but I thought I'd share. This conclusion is likely best suited for someone not using a small screened Mac. It turns out that most users (with big enough screens) don't really need Mission Control, Launchpad, Spaces, or Full Screen apps.
At all.
Let's go through that conclusion, one by one:
FULL SCREEN APPS
If you have a relatively big screen (20 iMac for instance), why do you need Safari full screen? Unless you intend to sit across the room from the computer, no reason. And there's lots of bright empty space when you do this. Do you need the Mail app full screen? If you need reading glasses, maybe, but otherwise, nope. I find it's easier just to stretch out an app pretty big and leave it at that.
Full screen apps DO offer a nice feature which is making your desktop, menubar, and dock go BYE BYE. I can see where sometimes this is a useful feature, but typically -- NOPE. Typically I want access to my dock (to switch between open apps without the added step of cancelling full screen first), and typically I want access to my menubar so that I can glance up and see what time it is or find an app menu quickly.
The only feature I find worthy of praise with full screen apps is that they hide the clutter on your desktop. But there's an app in the Mac App Store which makes your desktop icons vanish with the touch of a button (CAMOUFLAGE). I mean, what's the point of a wallpaper if you bury it with desktop clutter or eliminate it with full screen apps? If it's a busy and distracting wallpaper, umm... you picked bad wallpaper.
LAUNCH PAD
LAUNCH PAD offers an iOS experience inside OS X. At first I thought it was completely silly. After a month now, I kinda get why it's there. Kinda.
You see, before LP, to duplicate it's functionality, you'd have to organize folders yourself. Put folders of various apps together. Place them somewhere in the finder heirarchy. Then drag those folders into the part of the dock with the trashcan. Then you could click them open and have access to similarly themed folders of apps. The problem here, of course, is that unless you're a power user, you'll never do this.
So Apple thought, AH-HA, we'll just drag into OS X a paradigm that users already get from iOS. Clumping apps together any way you like them. The misfire, if you ask me, is not allowing users to drag the new iOS folders straight into the dock when finished. That is to say: copies of said organized folders. It's as if Apple's software people have complete contempt for the dock -- and are desperate to have users abandon it.
My problem is that I like having folders in my dock of stuff I need. It just works, as Steve says. Going to the same EXACT place every time I need anything is more intuitive and graceful than ADDING an app called Launchpad that launches you into a different finder altogether. Makes zero sense and THIS is why I say, like FULL SCREEN APPS, LP can basically be abandoned.
By the way: need proof that Apple has complete contempt for the Dock?
MISSION CONTROL/SPACES
A month has passed since MC was introduced and SPACES was eliminated. I dare anyone to tell me why either is needed at all. Before you get iMiffed, humor me for a moment and hear me out.
The notion of SPACES was that it's a neat way to keep like minded open apps together. I totally bought into this, back in the day. So much so that I was iMiffed when it was gone in Lion. But let's look at this closer.
The REASON why we needed SPACES was that we could have WAY too many windows open at once on a Mac. Right? A big mess of windows covering each other up. Suppose you're surfing in Safari but need iTunes? But iTunes is hidden. So what did you do? You went to Spaces as step one, moused over to your iTunes space as move two, and then clicked it as move three. Seems like a great solution until the day you discover that you could simply click on iTunes in the dock as move one and arrive at iTunes. As one step. Period. Really simple, right?
Why have Spaces and apps dance around when you can just click the app you want and be done with it? That's the critical observation to make in order to follow my entire line of reasoning. Sure, it may look really cool and make Windows machines look like junk, but at the end of the day, why add two steps to something you might do 100 times a day -- switching between apps.
So why OH why did Apple add Spaces? Simple: because too many apps were visible at once in one 'desktop' window. So if you can build many new desktops, there might only be one or two in each. Great solution. Right?
Wrong, as it turns out. Because we still have the two extra steps. It's a weak solution. And it's in complete contempt of the Dock, which as it turns out, offers the strongest solution.
The strong solution would be that only one app is visible in your Mac's window at all times. Say you're in Safari. Despite having 12 other apps open, you only see Safari. Your dock tells you that you have other apps open, but nothing else sits in your window BUT the app you're using. So you want to go to iTunes? So click on it in the dock and Safari vanishes and iTunes emerges by itself. No other windows. What could be simpler? (This app is freeware known as ISOLATOR.)
If you download and try ISOLATOR, you'll say, umm, okay, but wait: sometimes I do want more than one window in view. Okay, fine, turn it off then. From the handy menu bar menu. I find that 98% of the time I need ISOLATOR on. Mileage may vary.
So let's recap. One third party software removes distracting desktop clutter, the other removes distracting app windows. Both can be toggled on and off from the menu bar. One is free, one costs $2. These two solutions remove the only real feature of FULL SCREEN APPS and make SPACES and it's newfangled cousin MISSION CONTROL pointless.
Need that last one explained? Well, what's Mission Control but a variant of spaces? To invoke MC and switch to the needed window are those same two annoying steps Spaces added into the mix. Nothing was fixed. Plus, like spaces, you must invest time and energy organizing such spaces.
Why bother? And so I ask again: can somebody who's read and tried the above carefully explain to me why Mission Control, Launchpad, and Full Screen Apps are really needed at all? (Outside of small screened Macs.) Doesn't the dock and these two sharewares together solve most problems?
Am I missing something?

I agree with everything you said about full screen apps, mission control and launchpad. For apps that made sense to run full screen, they already could under SL. Launchpad is totally unnecessary and Mission Control is a mere shadow of Expose and Spaces.
However, I feel you have not given due credit to Spaces. The point of Spaces is to let one organise logical desktops for different tasks, not just a way to reduce the number of windows on display. For example, I have a Space for software development where I run Xcode and the iPhone simulator, a Firefox window showing perhaps documentation or some other websites pertaining to software development, a Finder window that is opened in the folder with my design docs. I have another Space where I have the remote login sessions, yet another Space with another Firefox window where I do general surfing and emailing. I can switch between these spaces using a keyboard shortcut, which is much quicker than having to lift my hand off the keyboard, move it over to the mouse, move the mouse pointer over the Dock, find the app and click on it, only to find that it has switched to the wrong window of the app.
Without Spaces, organisation of my desktop is disrupted each time I want to switch task, whereas Spaces allows me to drop everything I am doing, go and do something completely different for a while and go back to my exact previous environment. I have a 27" iMac so am not short of screen space but I use Spaces extensively. BTW, switching Spaces using a keyboard shortcut is a lot faster on SL than the equivalent on Lion, thanks to the gratuitous screen animation of the latter.

Issue with Java Mission Control 5.3

I see the following issue when using Java Mission Control 5.3 - the text area that appears in the Method Profiler section of the Code => Call Tree tab accepts text for filtering purposes. However, the filtering is seen to be applicable only to the top level nodes. For e.g., I am unable to search for a certain Java package name (or its part) that I know exists deep down in the stack trace. Is there a way to search for text that appears in lower level nodes? I find that the search does not work even if I expand the tree using the Expand Subtree option. Thanks for any insight.

I also have this issue on 5.3. It is very difficult to do even a basic level of profiler analysis. The tool is ok at finding big watermelons (CPU cost or memory allocations), but when you want to drill in and see any more detail, it becomes quite painful. Best case is that I would be able to "swim" through the profile data, moving easily from method-to-method, and see the recorded sample counts in a base (samples in this method itself) and cumulative (samples in this method and all called methods) fashion. The indentation in the tree view can be painful. I would suggest a more simplified view as an option,
PARENT (callers) methods, full names and cumulative sample counts (percentages would be nice as well)
SELF (called) method, full name and cumulative sample counts (percentages would be nice as well)
CHILD (calles) methods, full names and cumulative sample counts (percentages would be nice as well)
Clicking on any row in the above immediately makes that method become the SELF in the view.
Also, I should be able to enter the class/method name into some text box above this view and easily get into the data for the method. With the current tool, there is no way to quickly go to the data for a specific known method.

Why does Mission Control switch to the Desktop 1 without me issuing a command?

This happens to me constantly. I'll be working and not even touching the keyboard and Mission Control, without me doing ANYTHING switches me to Desktop 1. Can anyone tell me how to fix this?

I'm having the same issue. The only thing I can think is that there is something stealing focus back to the main screen. This didn't happen for me prior to upgrading to Mavericks.

Mission Control/ Expose issue with stacked pages hard to view. Please help

Is it just me or is there a real issue with the way Mission Control/ Expose displays these stacked windows? For instance, I had about 6 finder windows open, showing 6 different folders on my Desktop. If I then use Mission Control to quickly access a particular folder, it displays all my finder windows together, stacked up on one another and this makes it almost impossible to view which particular folder i want. It doesnt have the folder names displayed so this is seriuosly time consuming now. Is this something im doing wrong, or is it a valid issue?
many thanks

If you are just trying to see all the Finder windows which are available, just invoke App expose. I use a 4 finger swipe down. If you are in finder, just swipe. If you are in another application, hover your mouse over the Finder icon in the dock and swipe. All the windows are easy to see.
(You can, of course, do this with any application, not just the Finder.)
charlie

Mission Control won't a launch (except via Launchpad)

I updated this morning from SL to Mt Lion. I wanted to set up Spaces (similar to what I had in SL) and I found that it's now done via Mission Control. I've tried the various FKey ways (F3, F9) to launch Mission Control directly but the only way I could bring it up was to fire up Launchpad and then click the MC icon there -- or by assigning it to a hot-spot corner.
I've now set up my 8 Spaces so I guess I don't need to open Mission Control much and could probably live with bringing it up via Launchpad or the assigned hot spot. But I'm curious about why it's not being invoked via the FKeys. Any ideas?

Try deleting the com.apple.systempreferences.plist.
You need to look in your user Library/Preferences for the .plist. Either hold down the option key while using the Finder “Go To Folder” command and select your user Library in your home folder or use the Finder “Go To Folder” command and enter ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.systempreferences.plist. Move the .plist to your desktop.
Log out/in and test. If it works okay, delete the plist(s) from the desktop.
If the same, return the .plist(s) to where you got them from, overwriting the newer ones.
If you prefer to make your User library permanently visible, use the Terminal command found below.
Show User Library
You might want to bookmark the command. I had to use it again after I installed 10.8.4. I have also been informed that if you drag the user library to Finder it will remain visible.
If it soved the problem, you will probably have to reset some of your Preferences.

My spaces and mission control stop working shortly after startup

My spaces and mission control stop working shortly after startup. The feature to activate it on the keyboard won't work, also trying to open the app itself doesn't do anything and the multitouch two finger swipe and hpt corners I have setup don't do anything as well. Any idea on what might be conflicting to cause this?

Try moving your com.apple.spaces.plist from the preferences folder to the desktop then give it a try. To get your preference folder you will need to hold down the option key while clicking on the go menu in the finder then click on library then click the preferences folder.

Shortcut for launchpad only opens mission control

After installing lion i changed some of my function key shortcuts to work some of the features that have been replaced. I set up launchpad for F5 (which otherwise has no fuction as they keyboard is not backlit) but whenever i press F5 or fn+F5 mission control opens not launchpad, even though mission control has been given a different shortcut. Anyone any idea why this is the case and/or how to solve it?

Maybe this will help you out (instad of me)
https://discussions.apple.com/message/15706446#15706446

Launchpad and Mission Control animations are slow

Recently the animations for when opening Launchpad and Mission Control have been slower than usual. All the other animations seem to working fine and it's just those two which are the problem. Now whenever I try to open either one of them it would take ages and theres no point opening it at all. Is there a file that I could edit ot is there a Terminal command to speed it up?

Hello Ilhun,
Thank you for using Apple Support Communities.
For more information, take a look at:
OS X Mavericks: If graphics-intensive tasks slow down your Mac
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH13952
Have a nice day,
Mario

Google Chrome issue in LionOS - Mission Control

My Mac system version is Lion Mac OS X 10.7.2 (11C74) and Chrome is 16.0.912.63 9 (up to date).
The problem is that every time I switch screens using Mission Control, Chrome comes together to the next space. It doesn't happen to Safari nor any other program.
Anyone with a solution for that? I've sent messages to Apple and Google but had no replies whatsoever.
Thanks,
Rodd

To isolate the problem I recommend updating to the production version of Muse 2014.2 and temporarily removing the custom code for swiftype.

Mission Control launch issue with Mountain Island

I love the OS X Mountain Lion, but ever since I downloaded it, my 'mission control' freezes up when my computer wakes up from sleep mode. The only fix I have found is to restart my i-mac everyday. Is there another fix or reason for this?

Often, stuff like this is caused by third party software conflicts.
Does this behavior persist:
1) For a different user, e.g., Guest?
2) In Safe Mode?
charlie

Launchpad & Mission control Issues at Startup

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