Possible reason for the iMac G5 with 10.4.3 Sleep Problems

Question

Ok first off let me say that I got this new iMac G5 20" about 4 days ago. It's wonderful. If anyone out there is holding out for the intel machines, don't wait, get a G5. It's a fantastic machine. Now on to the meat of the subject. The story goes like this; I hooked up my Plextor PVR with eyeTV to my iMac to see how well it would do (been using it with a P4 Windoze XP machine and my iBook G4 14" with no problems). It worked just great. No problems with the iMac, the PVR or any of my other addons (including the boatload of software I migrated over from the iBook). So I set up EyeTV to record some stuff while I was asleep. It's supposed to wake up the Mac, record the shows then the Mac goes back to sleep. Easy huh? Well the wakeup, record part went just fine but the Mac wouldn't go back to sleep. Perplexed (actually thrilled, this is where I have my most fun with new machines, figuring out why they aren't working correctly) I did all the standard "I can't get my Mac to sleep automatically" things. You know, blow away all the plist files that have anything to do with powermanagement and autowake, reset NVRAM from OF, reset the PRAM (3 times just like the old days), reset the SMU, blow away all the Bluetooth plist files, etc, etc. Did them all, don't suggest any, I did them all I swear, really. I've been through this kind of thing before. One big difference with this iMac. Nothing and I mean nothing would work to fix the problem. The only way the bad boy would sleep is by hitting the Power button for a second or selecting "Sleep" from the Apple menu. Hmmmm. Spent the better part of a morning reading every thread here about peoples problems like mine. One post and I mean exactly one had something I hadn't tried. I rebooted the Mac in Safe Mode (hold the shift key down while it boots until you get the login screen with the red text "Safe Mode".) I forgot that OSX even did that. Logged in as myself (normal login but still in safe mode) and low and behold the thing would sleep automatically! I repeated this (boot in normal mode, boot in safe mode) many times. Every single time the Mac would sleep from safe mode but not from normal mode. Tells me it's software not hardware. In each mode I run "Activity Monitor" and save a list of the running processes to a text file. Now compare them and shutdown each process that is different one at a time. To make this story somewhat shorter (heh) I finally found that I could consistantly make the machine sleep or not sleep by killing the "mdimport" process and restarting it. This has to do with Spotlight. To be exact, it's the process that imports Metadata into Spotlights data list (I'm no expert, have a basic understanding of this). So on a hunch I ran the terminal and entered the command to delete then rebuild Spotlights databases, "mdutil -E /". Then I let Spotlight rebuild that databases and rebooted. Guess what? The iMac sleeps perfectly now, go figure. I did this once so far and the Mac has been working correctly now for about 5 hours. I've got a feeling that the problem will come back. Especially if it's an inherent problem in Spotlight and the 10.4.3 upgrade. I don't seem to have this problem with 10.4 or earlier. Long post I know but I thought it could help someone out. Please post any comments. I'd like to know if what I did is coincidence (I really don't think so since I reproduced it many times) or not.
-joe-
iBook G4 1Gig, iMac G5 2.1 Gig, iMac 266   Mac OS X (10.4.3)   iMac 266 running 10.3.6, been using Macs since the '80s

Answer 1

Right guy's i to have researched this problem
concerning my auto sleep problem.I started off by
following Joeaux's original post by safe
booting,noting what was running in the activity
monitor,booting normaly and again noting what was
running now.I eliminated the same processes that were
running from both boots, and then started quiting one
by one, the extra processes, from the normal boot, in
activity monitor.Once you quit a process, allow the
computer to try to go to sleep i.e set energy saver
to 1minute and wait to see what happens.I tried the "
mdimport"as of Joeaux but this was not my problem.In
my case the sleep problem was down to two
applications called N67U_ButtonManager and
N124U_ButtonManager.These are for use with my Canon
scanner.I also noted that if i left the scanner
connected to the computer this would also stop it
going to sleep,even after deleting the two
applications.Hope this helps!
Thank you now i know that those login items are for my scanner, and not logic audio i am a little less angry(Logic is now an apple application but the version I run was from the emagic days and i presumed that the button managers were from this app as it was the oldest bit of software running on my machine) By the way any apps that may cause a problem like this are more than likely simply residing in your user login items and can be disabled from there permanently as far as i can see.