This article describes a situation where text in certain control panels and contextual menus is unreadable.

Symptom

Certain Mac OS control panels, such as Text and Sound, may exhibit unreadable text. Also, the use of contextual menus may result in unreadable text, the system may stop responding, or display system errors.

Note: This issue only appears on certain Power Macintosh G4 (AGP) computers with a 500 MHz microprocessor and Mac OS 9.0.2 installed.

Ways to detect

1. Open the Text control panel and click the Behavior pull down menu. See Figure 1.

2. Go to the Sound control panel and select Alert Sounds. See Figure 2.

3. Open a contextual menu.
To open a contextual menu, press and hold down the Control key, while pointing to an item on the desktop and pressing and holding the mouse button.

Figure 1 Text control panel

Figure 2 Sound control panel

Solution

Rebuild the desktop and update the system software to Mac OS 9.0.4.

For instructions on how to rebuild the desktop, refer to article 10182: " Rebuilding Desktop File and Icon Recovery "

Use the Software Update control panel to download and install Mac OS 9 Update (9.0.4), if you are running Mac OS 9. You can also download the Mac OS 9 Update (9.0.4) from Apple Software Updates at http://www.apple.com/swupdates