apple icon menu item gone

Hi I have a mac book pro 2010 build and recently "upgraded" to mavericks. It has run sort of buggy since then and I have run the scripts to clean cashes etc. Today without any script, just executing a print command the finder went to simple finder in my admin accnt with no parental controls disabled. NO accnts have it active. The spotlight vanished along with it's kebbouard shortcuts. I found how to fix that and got the full finder back but the apple icon has lost most of it's menu items!!

I don't know how to insert an image.. Well there are just 3 or 4 things now and no shutdown option etc.

thats all that's left! Any ideas. I reboot, I return to defaults. I purge cashes. Any ideas.

I miss snow leopard but there are just too many apps that won't interface with it anymore.

G'day and welcome to the forums.

Updated to OS X.9.4? Even if you have suggest using the Combo Updater. Next suggestion is have seen here various times on laprops a clean install seems to do much better than the simple upgrade.


http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1755

Thanks Harry and you are so right. nice corgy dog BTW Apple just presented the install as so stable and more like an ungrade than a new OS. Next time I will do a clean install. I managed to get the apple icons' menu back to full listing and the rest of the machine up to almost new speed and function by using cocktail, disk warrior and onyx.
In disk warrior I fixed permissions and "checked all files" which did show some problem files which I took care of.
In cocktail I ran the same permissions fix and purged user and internet cashes, double checked that the spotlight options were set to visible (i.e. not hidden) and then erased it indexso it coould rebuild, Made sure "enable simple finder was NOT selected,
In onyx, under parameter I unselected "show the interface level switching" (this brought back the spotlight right away), And made sure "show" spotlight icon was enabled.
Then I gave 'er the reboot.
I don't know which of these things did the trick but doing them all has purged the machine of any buggy behavior.
I have these apps set to run maintananence scripts now so that's that. thanks mate, have a good one.

Wow you did the lot.

Personally I use DW, and a little utility clled Macaroni that cleans those maintenance issues at 3am whilst my iMac slumbers. And have always made a bootable USB thumb drive of the operating system, maintain a clone backup and do a clean install each and every time a new operating system is released.

Yes DW has been with me, too, for a awhile. I might see about the macaroni but cocktail has a pretty good script scheduled for midnights for a long time now. It's enough. Onyx used to force quit apps when it was running earlier versions but this new version I tried seems to be more polite than it's older sibs. I can't say just how this crazy loss of file structure access happened. I tend to get going fast with keyboard strokes when I'm in working in media editing apps. and I had been in a bit of a furour and most likely used some weird, obscure dos command or shortcut that triggered the change. It was a very sudden shift. All's well that ends well. I have the OS not on a USB but on a descreet HD that I can go back to and use to reinsall if need be or boot for repair (rare with this mac). I have a user accnt that is in "out of the box" condition so I can go check the state of the OS as opposed to the user account (where most trouble can be traced). I will look into doing the bootable USB drive jazz. I suppose one could, hypothetically, use it on various machines. ciao, Uhane