Mac OS X: what process is responsible for volume control (and other stuff)

Question

The keys for volume control (i.e. volume up/down/mute) aren't working right now - along with a few other things. For example the "About My Mac..." menu entry doesn't work. And also, the system settings dialog loads fine but when I click on the sound settings, it crashes/freezes. Audio itself works fine though, I am just right now playing some music in iTunes.

I'm quite sure it would work again after a restart or even a relogin and that the process which is responsible for it just crashed.

Though, I am curious, what process is it? Does someone know? (And then I maybe would just restart that process instead of my whole machine -- everything else is fine and I hate restarts.)

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I also looked at the Console logs and every 10 seconds, I am getting this entry:

28.06.10 22:32:46 com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[156] (net.infinite-labs.PlugSuit.Agent) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds
28.06.10 22:29:56 com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[156] (net.infinite-labs.PlugSuit.Agent[86943]) posix_spawn("/Users/az/Library/PreferencePanes/PlugSuit.prefPane/Contents/Resources/PlugSuit Agent.app/Contents/MacOS/PlugSuit Agent", ...): No such file or directory
28.06.10 22:29:56 com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[156] (net.infinite-labs.PlugSuit.Agent[86943]) Exited with exit code: 1

I wonder a bit what that is (I guess something I have installed at some time, don't remember anymore, at least a year ago) and why that is causing troubles right now.

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Those who wondered about the WLAN symbol (what I have written earlier, where I initially thought it might be related), this is what I have found in the Console:

28.06.10 13:54:24   airportd[82188] [most time: (2.651557) _scan] trace: <CFArray 0x100102840 [0x7fff70939f20]>{type = mutable-small, count = 9, values = (
    0 : <CFString 0x10003acb0 [0x7fff70939f20]>{contents = "pref_netwk_AJ"}
    1 : <CFString 0x10003ab70 [0x7fff70939f20]>{contents = "scan non-DFS channels"}
    2 : <CFString 0x10010f550 [0x7fff70939f20]>{contents = "(2.651557) _scan"}
    3 : <CFString 0x100111280 [0x7fff70939f20]>{contents = "(0.000011) _lookup"}
    4 : <CFString 0x100110cf0 [0x7fff70939f20]>{contents = "(0.090089) _association"}
    5 : <CFString 0x10003ab90 [0x7fff70939f20]>{contents = "scan non-DFS channels again"}
    6 : <CFString 0x100502cf0 [0x7fff70939f20]>{contents = "(1.470134) _scan"}
    7 : <CFString 0x100501820 [0x7fff70939f20]>{contents = "(0.000009) _lookup"}
    8 : <CFString 0x10050cf90 [0x7fff70939f20]>{contents = "(0.408480) _association"}
)}
com.apple.message.domain: com.apple.airport.autojoin.summary
com.apple.message.signature: AutoJoinSuccess
com.apple.message.result: success
com.apple.message.value: 4.722627
com.apple.message.value2: 5.000000
com.apple.message.value3: 1.000000
com.apple.message.uuid: E637229A-E004-44C8-9F8B-0845B23CD93D

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Ok, after killing randomly some other processes, I made my system mostly unuseable so I were forced to restart. I still see the errors about PlugSuit every 10 seconds in the Console log. Although just everything works right now -- I would not even know about that PlugSuit if I wouldn't have looked into the Console.

Answer 1

I'd guess either BezelUIServer or coreaudiod.

Answer 2

I can't prove it, but I suspect this will be the domain of SystemUIServer, as the issue seems to revolve entirely around the menu bar.

I'd check your Console logs for any issues, and consider rebooting to bring the process back online correctly.

Update based on the new information:

I suspect PlugSuit is your real problem. Based on the site, it seems to manage extenders to the Mac OS X system. You'll probably want to disable all of those extenders and remove PlugSuit, particularly since your tags indicate that you're on Snow Leopard, and there's a huge red warning on the site that Snow Leopard is explicitly not supported.

Answer 3

Do you have the PlugSuit prefpane installed? The first group of messages seems to come from that. Their webpage claims it isn't compatible with 10.6 and has instructions for removing it. Resolve that issue first, then see if you still have a volume-control issue. There may be more than one thing going on here. Or this process may be taking something else down with it.