For most of the day today I’ve been missing all the OS X menu extras in the top right of my MacBook screen, including my clock, airport and volume controls. I never knew how much I used that stuff until it suddenly wasn’t there. I knew I could probably restart my system and get it all back up and running, but I’m not going to kill 8 days of uptime for that! So I look around the net and find out that those menus are controlled by a process called SystemUIServer. Luckily they say it will restart itself if you kill it so I force quit it with Activity Monitor. The process comes back (with a new pid so I know it’s new) but my menus are still missing. Hmmph.
I look in the console and don’t see anything that looks like an error. I hit Command-space to invoke spotlight and nothing happens but I do get a console message that says “-[MDMenuWindow _checkTopRight] the window is off the screen topRight point is {-10, 778}”. Interesting. Somehow it pops into my head that I had my MacBook hooked into my HDTV yesterday and that maybe the menu bar is just confused about the width of the screen. So I open System Preferences and change my window size to something random and suddenly all my menu extras show up! Yay! I change my screen back and a few window resizes later everything is back to normal.
All without a reboot. Ahhhhh….