ok, I'm stumped. My wife's MBP seems to be possessed. it's an '09 model, problems started this morning when she woke it from hibernate.The first part is what she told me, the rest i actually saw.


- iPhoto launched on its own and said it needed to perform [something]. She doesn't remember what, but apparently there were a lot of check boxes. I wasn't there for this, so I'm guessing maybe a DB corruption was detected. It basically has hung all day trying to import photos and doesn't seem to make any progress, and pegs the CPU at 80%+ constantly. no pinwheel of death, but you have to force quit the app.

- the address bar in safari would not allow you to type anything at all. if you click on a link, it would pop up a new window with the same page you were previously on. if you close one window, it closes all other windows. this behavior just stopped on its own.

- if you fired up another app, such as word, it would hide all other apps. closing that app would bring back the other apps that were on the screen (at the time, just safari and iphoto). this behavior just stopped on its own.

- if you bring up any app and click on somewhere that you can type in, you still cannot type anything, but now it simply types 0's constantly. this is true for Safari, Word, and textpad (haven't tried others). power cycled the machine. same symptom, except instead of 0's, it's periods.

was able to run a scan with disk utility and all came up fine.

google does not seem to point to anything that might describe wtf is going on. my best guess is bad memory, but that seems unlikely to me.

7/11/2012 10:08:09 PM

Have you tried restarting it?

7/11/2012 10:10:01 PM

yup. i guess it was buried in the text wall.

7/11/2012 10:23:22 PM

Can you boot into single user mode?

does external keyboard work?

The safari thing sounds like the "option" button was being held down by accident.

It sounds like a spontaneous key is being held down in all your cases.

If you don't notice this behavior in single user mode, there is either a malicious app, or a weird driver issue. If you see this only with the built in keyboard, then there may be a lose connection or a fried keyboard.

If you can open up the command line and run top and look for any suspicious processes. Or do a ps -ax and look for weird thing (expand window or pipe it into less or something).

7/12/2012 3:22:55 AM

How likely is it that she spilled something on the keyboard?

SPOILER ALERT: It's about 115%.

7/12/2012 9:16:08 AM

put a cd in, restart.

If doing the whole command C thing doesn't work....

See ^ for the spoiler.

7/12/2012 9:18:04 AM

she spilled something on the keyboard

7/12/2012 11:24:46 AM

That sounds crazy. Whenever I have a weird issue with my MB, I reset my PRAM and all is well. I doubt this would fix your problem, but worth a shot I guess.

7/12/2012 11:30:42 AM