Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2014 January 23

= January 23 =

Internet Explorer showing blank tab and grayed out menu items
I'm running Internet Explorer 10 (I think) on Windows. For whatever reason, a few days ago Internet Explorer just has a blank tab with no title and no address and most of the menu items under button in the shape of a gear are grayed out. How do I fix this? — Melab±1 &#9742; 03:46, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

fr — Preceding unsigned comment added by Yoshichan255 (talk • contribs) 07:57, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

OS X 10.6.8, permissions, Java
I seem to be in charge of the office Mac, which has OS X 10.6.8. It exhibited no problems until a couple of months ago, whereupon it started to display the marble of doom a lot. Even something as trivial as clicking the edit tab to write this would have provoked the twirling umbrella, as the computer seemed to think "Well, hmm, let me see if I really want to do this for you."

Neither Activity Monitor nor Console showed any problem that was blazingly obvious. I read up on Mac sluggishness and learned that widely advertised "cleaning" software was snakeoil whereas OnyX might be good. I installed it and ran it. Its start-up checking procedure detected no disc problem. I didn't quite know what to do with it after that, and the only menu option that looked as if it might be relevant was file permissions. I ran that. Fixing file permissions took a long time, but afterward the computer ran fast. Excellent!

But the damn computer soon reverts to its sluggish state. (1) I thereupon run OnyX; (2) OnyX (permissions) finds problems and fixes them; (3) the computer runs fast but after a day or so slows down intolerably; (4) yawn, GOTO (1).

OnyX provides a dump of the names of the rogue files. These mean little or nothing to me. There's always a lot related to Java, e.g. "System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Classes/dt.jar". There's always [human] language-specific stuff, e.g. "System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Support/Remote Desktop Message.app/Contents/Resources/Italian.lproj/UIAgent.nib"; I haven't consciously used these languages and I doubt that anybody else has either.

I don't know if Java is part of the problem or just part of the symptoms. Uninstalling it and reinstalling a freshly downloaded version seems harmless at worst and imaginally beneficial. But I don't even know where it is: all I see is Java Preferences.app, which says that the computer has version 1.6.0_65-b14-462 of Java SE 6 64-bit and 32-bit but doesn't offer to check if these are the latest or have any diagnostics option that I can see.

Any suggestions? Morenoodles (talk) 09:09, 23 January 2014 (UTC)