OS X Desktop Refreshing

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I've had my first Mac for a couple of years and not had any problems. But the last two days, I've had issues with desktop refreshing.

The symptoms: The wallpaper fades slightly or occasionally it becomes a gray screen. The menu bar at the top and the desktop icons disappear. Then they gradually all appear again, as if the Mac were starting up. Safari browser tabs are refreshed, sometimes opening tabs just closed. Other programs act as if they were "just opened" -- opening a new blank document as if the program was just opened. Any opened documents are closed.

This occurs periodically and doesn't appear to occur according to any set time. Sometimes it occurs frequently back to back and sometimes it will go a quarter of an hour. It often appears triggered by a change -- opening or closing a safari tab or switching between two programs.

I saw forum entries for the "stuffit avr" fix. I do not have "stuffit avr" on this computer.

I have checked for updates and updated Safari. I've run the disk utility to verify the disk and the permissions. I've reset Safari. I thought it might be a problem with dropbox or the icloud menu app, so I turned those off. The problem still persist.

I'm at a loss, and not terribly proficient with Mac trouble shooting. So any help is appreciated.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
Silver M1 iMac 512/16/8/8 macOS 11.6
G'day and welcome to the forums.

Helps enormously if you provide model and operating system. However if the operating system came with an install disc, boot from that holding down 'C' after the chime, leave Installer and into Utilities > Disk Utility and run Repair Disk and see what is reported.

For Lion and Mountain Lion use Command+R and check out the drive. Not running MacKeeper or AV software?
 
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Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro8,1
Processor Name: Intel Core i5
Processor Speed: 2.3 GHz

System Version: OS X 10.8.3 (12D78)
Kernel Version: Darwin 12.3.0

I do not have MacKeeper. I have Sophos AV. I've repaired disk permissions and run the repair disk utility a couple of times and each time and nothing seems to be wrong with that.
 
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Here's what repairing permissions and running a verify says about the disk. The error there, according to Mac, is not anything to worry about.


Repairing permissions for “Macintosh HD”
Warning: SUID file “System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/ARDAgent” has been modified and will not be repaired.

Permissions repair complete

Verifying volume “Macintosh HD”
Checking file systemPerforming live verification.
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking extents overflow file.
Checking catalog file.
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking catalog hierarchy.
Checking extended attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
The volume Macintosh HD appears to be OK.
 
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Firmware been updated to version 2.7?
 
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Yes. It appears so.

Boot ROM Version: MBP81.0047.B27
SMC Version (system): 1.68f99
 

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