Updated: Adobe CS5 Updater freezes Snow Leopard menu bar

After coming across this issue just the other day, it happened again. I opened my MacBook Pro running the newly installed CS5 and the Adobe Application Manager program had just run another update. It seems as though when a new update is found, a process within the status notification icon on the Snow Leopard menu bar freezes the rest of the icons on the bar. While logging out of the user or restarting still fixes this, it is not a permanent solution. Read past the break to see how to turn off the Adobe Application Manager menu bar notification icon.

Simply open the Adobe Application Manager program and click on preferences. Uncheck the box for "Notify me of new updates in the menu bar." as shown below:

Original Article:
After installing Adobe's latest Creative Suite series, version 5, I had an issue where the Adobe Updater menu bar icon would freeze the rest of Snow Leopard's menu bar, including MobileMe's sync icon, Spaces, and even the clock. Today was a particularly bad morning to have this happen, as I had to keep a keen eye for the 10 a.m. start time of Steve Jobs' Keynote address from the Apple World Wide Developers Conference.

Adobe's recently released Creative Suite 5 promises a multitude of new and exciting creative possibilities for photographers, filmmakers, and designers. What it didn't promise was to freeze my menu bar. The freeze occurs when the Adobe Updater makes its first update check and launches its menu bar icon. All Mac OS X native menu bar icons then became unusable, including the displays settings, Spaces, MobileMe Sync, fast user switching, and even the clock.

As you can imagine, this can severely hamper work flows that depend on those icons or inconvenience users that rely on their system clocks to see the time. The odd part about this issue was that the icons for third-party applications, in my case Adium, worked fine in the menu bar. My first instinct was to check the Force Quit list (Command -Option-ESC) to see if the Adobe Updater was not responding. In this case, the application did not show up in the list. I also checked Activity Monitor and it did not show up in the application list either.

Simply logging out of my user account and logging back in seems to have fixed the issue. The Adobe Updater icon loaded properly on the menu bar and the rest of the icons now work just fine. For now, when you initially load Adobe Creative Suite 5, try running the Adobe Updater right away (do not wait for it to auto-run). That should preempt issues with the initial loading of the program.

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