I'm asking this here because I honestly have no idea how to google for this problem.

I was holding my keyboard up to brush off my desk and accidentally dropped it, hitting a few buttons in the process. Suddenly after that my chat client (Adium) crashed and it continues to do so every time I open it. There is a little black box that frames windows and random areas on my desktop now and I don't know why it's there. The apple menu now shows two options for logging out, restarting and shutting down.

Any clue what's going on here?

2/18/2007 1:54:17 AM

wait i'm confused

i thought macs don't have problems?

2/18/2007 1:54:50 AM

That's what makes it so weird. I've been using OS X for years now and haven't had a problem like this.

2/18/2007 1:56:02 AM

replace your keyboard.

2/18/2007 3:57:50 AM

^^^Don't think that covers dropping electronics.

[Edited on February 18, 2007 at 1:44 PM. Reason : ]

2/18/2007 1:44:31 PM

I didn't realize that dropping a keyboard two inches could screw up my whole computer.

I assumed that the problem here is something that I accidentally keyed in when dropping it.

[Edited on February 18, 2007 at 1:54 PM. Reason : but as soon as I can find another usb keyboard to use I'll see if it's the problem.]

2/18/2007 1:52:18 PM

Replacing the keyboard with another one does nothing for the problem.

2/18/2007 2:03:45 PM

nice, by dropping your keyboard you took out your mac.

gg

2/18/2007 2:06:40 PM

Well it will be very easy to reformat and have it be as good as new. I'm just trying to save myself the trouble of having to back up all my files.

2/18/2007 2:11:00 PM

Create a new user account and see if it has the same problem. If not, you can just migrate all the files and correct the permissions.

2/18/2007 2:29:23 PM

No problems on the new user account. Thanks for the suggestion!

2/18/2007 2:33:39 PM

w00t! Seems like the keyboard drop could be a coincidence. I've never known a malfunctioning peripheral to lead to software problems, but that's not to say it couldn't have happened.

2/18/2007 2:47:41 PM

I did just install some software updates, including an update of the program that first started malfunctioning, so maybe that was part of the problem.

2/18/2007 2:49:14 PM

Quote :

"The black box is an indication you've got Voiceover turned on. Try pressing the Apple Key along with the F5 key. Does that help with at least the boxes? "

That fixed everything. Apparently those are the buttons that I hit when I dropped it.

2/18/2007 2:57:39 PM

Haha. Holy crap. I didn't even know about that feature. I turned it on with the speakers on. FTW!

I mean, I've known about Universal Access for years, but I never really messed with any of the features.

[Edited on February 18, 2007 at 3:13 PM. Reason : ]

2/18/2007 3:08:23 PM