Question:

Brad writes: I’ve been having an interesting issue after upgrading to Snow Leopard on my MacBook Pro and was hoping you could enlighten me. Occasionally after booting up my Mac, say around 1 in 10 instances, I find that my menu bar fails to appear on screen. Other times the icons in the menu bar, such as spotlight and battery life, will appear, but there will be no menu bar border. Usually opening any application will spring the menu bar back onto the screen, but I’ve had a few occurrences where I had to reboot the machine to correct problem. It’s a puzzling issue, and I have no idea about where to even begin.

Answer:

Brad - Chances are you had some Google software installed previously. There is an issue with Google Updater on Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6.x) which causes this exact issue. The best bet is to uninstall the Google Updater. 

Per Google’s Instructions:

To uninstall Google Updater, you first have to uninstall other Google software on your computer. You can’t uninstall Google Updater while you have Google software on your computer because we need it there to keep your software up-to-date.

1. In Google Updater, click My Software List.
2. If you have any Google software (other than Updater), click it, then click Uninstall.
3. Click Google Updater.
4. Click the Uninstall button. If asked, enter an adminstrator account name and password.

If you don’t want to uninstall your software but JUST your updater, our own John Martellaro wrote an excellent how-to article about removing unwanted software. In a nutshell, there’s an item in ~/Library/LaunchAgents that you need to pull. John’s article has the details.