Begone foul 10 bar

August 11, 2009 2:06 PM

What the hell is this? It's floating above all my windows, cannot be clicked, and is not any application in my dock or menu bar. Have you seen this before?

Extended information. MBP, OSX 10.5. Boxers.

posted by cellphone to Computers & Internet (14 answers total)

Try rebooting. Seriously.

(Long answer: It's probably a bug from (some program) and you could go through each of your programs and quit them one at a time to see if it goes away or you could just reboot, get a cup of coffee and have it fix itself magically.)
posted by unixrat at 2:09 PM on August 11, 2009

Response by poster: I think I've encountered it before and just rebooted, but what a stupid solution.
posted by cellphone at 2:10 PM on August 11, 2009

Response by poster: And I already went through all my programs, killed the Dock, Finder, all of it. I'm just wondering if someone encountered it already and knows what it is, because my curiosity is driving me nuts.
posted by cellphone at 2:11 PM on August 11, 2009

I'm going to take a wild ass guess and say it's a volume readout for your sound card. My USB sound module displays something that looks a bit like that when I adjust the physical volume control. It vanishes again after a second or two, when things are working correctly.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 2:16 PM on August 11, 2009

Response by poster: It's not volume control, I have no accessories plugged in and I messed with the volume.
posted by cellphone at 2:18 PM on August 11, 2009

Response by poster: I rummaged through my active processes, killing things with wanton abandon and could not locate the item in question. At any rate, iTunes was one of the many apps I closed and reopened.
posted by cellphone at 2:24 PM on August 11, 2009

Wild ass guess, but it looks like the virtual scrollbar feature enabled on a lot of the trackpads on Windows boxes these days. Maybe the Mac has an equivalent and digging around in your mouse properties will turn it up?
posted by JaredSeth at 2:31 PM on August 11, 2009

Hm, kind of looks like a brightness indicator for the monitor. Could it be a OS X (shell) bug?
posted by spiderskull at 2:43 PM on August 11, 2009

WAG #2: Does it follow your desktop with Spaces or is it isolated to a single desktop? You may need to enable Spaces. A few other things I'd try: logging out and back in, enabling fast user switching and switching to a different account and back (it'd be really interesting if it actually followed to the other user account).

If it starts happening with regularity you need to track what applications you've got open or recently closed, when it occurs.

This is very pedantic but your [more inside] contained so few extra lines it would really have been better off in the main question, especially since the operating system is significant.
posted by 6550 at 2:44 PM on August 11, 2009

Have you looked in the Accesibility Features panel in System Preferences? I've traced a few mysteries back to that bugger.
posted by martens at 3:14 PM on August 11, 2009

Response by poster: I already logged out and back in, so I can't provide an active process list. I'm more wondering if anyone has seen the same thing and traced it back to something. Thanks everyone.
posted by cellphone at 8:19 PM on August 11, 2009

I recommend posting to ask.reddit, if only to hit a wider audience (of tech-leaning folk).
posted by spiderskull at 12:35 AM on August 12, 2009

Response by poster: If anyone is still reading this, it came back and I prepared a list of processes, minus ones I know aren't at fault.
posted by cellphone at 11:48 AM on August 17, 2009

Best answer: I found the issue. I have Razer drivers installed for my mouse. I configured the scroll wheel to control on-the-fly-sensitivity, which displays as a bar I can control with the wheel. Click the wheel solves the issue.
posted by cellphone at 12:56 PM on August 27, 2009