Weird screen saver problem

[Christopher Bort]

On 07/31/08 07:06, gsslist+osxadmin at anthropohedron.net (Gregory 
Seidman) wrote:

>My MacBook Pro (running 10.5.4) has been occasionally showing a black
>screen when waking from sleep (opening the lid and entering my password to
>unlock). The pointer is visible, however, and moves normally with the
>touchpad. If I close the lid to put it back to sleep then open it again,
>after I unlock it everything seems normal... except the screen saver never
>starts under any circumstances.

++ with a 10.4.11 MacBook, except that screen saver still works 
normally after finally waking.

>Running
>/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/
>/ScreenSaverEngine
>.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine from the commandline exits
>immediately with no output and does not leave a process running. Using
>the Start Screen Saver action in Automator fails with a content-free
>error. Hot corners to start the screen saver are ignored. All I get in
>the console log is a cryptic "Screen saver is running in blackout
>mode."
>
>Logging out and logging back in fixes the problem, but I'm hoping someone
>knows of another way to revive the normal operation of the screen saver.

Sorry, no other fix here, but I'd be happy to hear of one too. 
FTR, closing the lid and letting it sleep again is only slightly 
annoying to me as a work-around. More annoying is that 
occasionally when waking from hibernation (aka deep sleep) I get 
a kernel panic. I've taken to quitting Mailsmith before sleeping 
to avoid corrupting its message store. This particular MacBook 
has been used by two other people before me and has been knocked 
around a bit (ethernet is inoperative for one thing), so I can't 
say that the kernel panics are not due to some user-induced 
hardware problem.

-- 
Christopher Bort
<topher at thehundredacre.net>
<http://www.thehundredacre.net/>