System Preferences pops up after screensaver, Everytime!

[funduk]

Hi,

I'm relatively new to the mac (and glad to be here!) but I know enough about this basic stuff to believe I didn't do anything wrong!

Here's my issue.

First, this is happening on the most recent generation Powerbook G4 12", so 1.5ghz, 60gb, airport/bluetooth/etc, combo, 768mb of ram (upgraded it a bit)... the same one they have at the store now for the 12" powerbook. It's running the absolute newest stuff there is, I make sure to update as often as possible. So that makes my OS version 10.4.5 build 8H14.

On to my issue. I have the following external stuff plugged into the powerbook.

Power

Regular ethernet cable

usb hub with camera and keyboard (which also has the mouse attached to it), camera not plugged in, just the cable, it has been like this for weeks upon weeks. Same with the keyboard and mouse.

External 19" monitor. Using the mini-dvi to vga converter, again this has been going on for months.

audio jack to speakers.

I've got, say, itunes on my 12" laptop screen and everything else running in 1280x1024 on my 19" monitor.

All goes well until I get up and leave, i come back and the laptop has not gone to sleep but just goes into screen saver / blank screen mode (powersaving and such according to my prefs). This is good, I know it's not sleeping since the fans are still going and my torrents dont stop downloading etc.

When I move the mouse the laptops screen pops right back up and shows itunes / desktop / whatever... the 19"er takes a few seconds since it's kind of old, eventually it comes back up and behind all of my windows is a system preferences window.. the same one that comes up as if you were to goto <Apple Menu> -> System Preferences... I click on it and quit system preferences and it closes without issue. But next time i leave the computer for enough time that the screen goes blank it comes right back!

What's going on!?

Thanks for any advice / thoughts on this.
-- Ryan

 

[Ric]

Hi there Ryan and welcome !

sorry for the delay...

The first thing I would suggest is turn everything off...

Then unplug external monitor and turn Mac etc back on...

See if the SYtem Prefs thing still occurs...

Try this for everything that is plugged in one at a time so that you can isolate if it is a hardware fault/conflict....

I would expect it to be software...so if the unplugging doesn't work we'll try to delete a few of the Preference files...

Let us know how the unplugging goes then I'll post what prefs to delete...

regards

Ric

 

[funduk]

Hi, thanks for the reply. Didn't take much longer than the linux forums I'm used to so no problem

I've actually JUST figured it out. I suspected that it was near impossible for it to be something I have plugged in, but just to be sure I unplugged everything and used my powerbook on batteries for a while over on the couch, comfy!

I let it go to screensaver / idle / powersave / whatever and sure enough coming out gives me the same prefpane, so looks like you were right, it's a software issue.

Then I realized that the screen saver wasn't infact coming on! So I went and checked the settings for that and it turns out that was the problem. There's this screen saver called electric sheep that's really awesome, but it downloads these animations from the web... and it's worked before, but I had the screensaver on random for a few weeks and it hadn't come up, then I guess it got stuck on the sheep screen saver and that was causing osx to bring up the preferences kind of subtling hinting to me that something was broken!

So. I turned off random screensaver, chose some random iphoto album and away I go.

So all is good. Don't use electric sheep! Or at least dont use it with random and forget about it, and then wonder why you're getting a prefpane

Thanks,
Ryan

 

[Ric]

Nice one !

Glad you got it fixed.

regards

Ric