by The system menu bar in OS X is usually fully accessible, either by moving your mouse to the top of the screen and clicking on it or by using hotkeys. However, there may be times when that menu bar stops working: It may disappear or stop functioning, items on it may be grayed out or frozen, or your cursor may show the spinning beach-ball when you hover your cursor over a menu bar item. Here’s how to troubleshoot the problem when any of those things happen.
Frozen menu items
Whatever the specific problem, the first thing to do is to check whether the frozen menu is the result of a third-party add-on, such as Dropbox, LittleSnitch, Evernote, or the like. You can determine this by hovering your mouse over each menu item for a few seconds. If only one item produces the spinning color wheel when accessed in this manner, and the others are still functional, you’ve isolated the problem. You can further check this by opening Activity Monitor to see if any hanging processes (highlighted in red text) correspond to the frozen menu item.
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