Top Menu Bar Freezing

Hey, I just noticed this today, I'm not sure how long it's been going on though. On my Powerbook G4, certain top menu bar items, all that have to do with OS X, including the TIME, SPOTLIGHT, AIRPORT MONITOR, as well as SOUND CONTROL freeze temporarily. Thus, the time freezes and does not display the correct time. Instead it displays the time at which the freeze occured. When you mouseover any of these items, the rainbow wheel appears. Has anyone had this problem? Possible fix? Thanks a lot!

Hi, Spencer and Inspired, et.al. —
Edit: Inspired's post appeared while I was editing what's below. We clearly agree on potential solutions. Since I've listed a few additional suggestions, I'll post this as a complement to Inspired's excellent response . . .
Some background and a few ideas for you to try —
The items on the right side of the menu bar are called "menu extras," and are managed by a process named SystemUIServer. When the behavior you've described is occurring, you may want to open Activity Monitor and check whether SystemUIServer is "hanging." If so, this may be a temporary situation. Your logs may provide an indication of what's causing the problem (I'd check system.log and console.log first). Please post back if you'd like help doing this.
From various readers' reports and solutions, this kind of problem can be caused by a number of things — including Spotlight activity, corrupted .plist files, incompatible 3rd-party "menu extras," etc.
For now, you may want to try these ideas (one at a time):
(1) Check that it's not simply an issue with Spotlight activity &/or indexing. If it is, waiting a little should do the trick.
(2) Locate these two files, move them to the trash, and restart:
~/Library/Preferences/ com.apple.systemuiserver.plist
~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/ com.apple.systemuiserver.xxxxxxxxxxxx.plist.
After restarting, these preference files will be regenerated. But please note that you may have to reset all of your preferences involving menu extras — or launch them from the "Menu Extras" folder, as described above.
(3) Identify any 3rd-party "menu extras" you have installed, and disable them — then check to see the impact of this change. If you have unsanity's Application Enhancer system (APE) installed, you may have to use its preference panel and uninstall it.
(4) Try locating and re-enabling menu extras — either from their respective System Preferences or (not all have prefs) from their path: Go to /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras. All of the menu extras are located here. (SystemUIServer is also located in the CoreServices folder.) Double-click to re-enable any of the menu extras that are currently disabled. Note that, if you make a mistake, you can click on any menu extra and ⌘-drag it to a diffferent location or off the menu bar entirely. You may want to restart (some would say to also repair permissions) after doing this — but I can't confirm this is necessary.
(5) In several situations (that I mention only as a ~"last resort"), users have used Pacifist to extract a "fresh" copy of SystemUIserver from their Install Disc or, e.g., from the 10.4.3 Combo Update Package and replacing the existing copy of SystemUIServer. Note that there are supporting files — so please post back to discuss this if you eventually decide it's warranted.
I hope one of these solutions that have worked for others is helpful.
Please feel free to post back and discuss things further . . .
Good luck!
Dean
Message was edited by: Dean Pahl

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