Please Help SL - Everything 'quits unexpectedly' and top menu bar flashing

Question

Please Help. Snow Leopard - Everything 'quits unexpectedly' and top menu bar flashing.
Basically, I have been using snow leopard for about 1-2 weeks now without any problems, apart from the strange trackpad expose glitch, but I can live with that. But a new problem has arisen that I CANNOT live with. Basically I plugged in my MiniDisplay > VGA adaptor and a Wacom internet tablet for the first time. And when it booted up rather than just the usual spinning gear, their was a progress bar as-well. Then it booted into Safe Mode.?
Everything was fine in safe mode apart from spotlight didn't work properly so I rebooted and this time it loaded normally. EXCEPT about 5 minutes after I logged on the top menu bar started to flash on and off about ever 1-2 seconds and virtually every single application would quit unexpectedly before even loading. I haven't really looked into it apart from a quick search on google which doesn't seem to bring up anything similar, but atm I am having to use my bootcamp partition with windows installed (shock horror :D) just so I can browse the internet.
Additional details -
I have tried resetting PRAM + NVRAM with no joy
While logging on (before it crashes), menu items (e.g. Airport, Battery Indicator, Facebook Notifier) all load up on the far right BEFORE the clock, which never happened before the problem, don't know if this will help isolate the problem, but its worth mentioning..
Don't really want to go down the fresh install route if possible, as I did this with leopard about 2 months before Snow Leopard was released

Answer 1

I noticed it some weeks after installing Snow Leopard, and didn't think much about it since I have a Wacom mouse, and the Wacom driver often has some little peculiarities at startup with the Mac OS--sometimes everything is perfectly ordinary, there will be an OS update and a little oddness shows up, the driver eventually gets updated and the oddness disappears until some other OS update, and so on. I just figured that was what it was until my brother asked about the missing the menu bar after startup, which reappears with a click. He doesn't use a Wacom mouse, but he does have some other 3rd party mouse. I don't know whether 3rd party mouse drivers are at fault or not. But it is not a problem with the SystemUIServer.....the entire menu bar is missing, not just a goof-up on the Spotlight end, where SystemUIServer is in charge of things. Since simply clicking the mouse brings the menu bar up I've never even bothered to check the logs to see if anything is noted there.
Francine
Francine
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