Mac Screensaver Freezes - OS X Lion

Hi all,

I keep getting a random error with the Mac OS X Lion Screensaver in that from time to time when I try to get back to the desktop it will show then login prompt, then carry on playing the screen saver!

In other words, you can't get back to the desktop.

On the few occasions that this has happened, I have been able to bring up Mission Control with a gesture (three-fingers swipe up), then laboriously load the Activity Monitor.

Then you get back to the screen saver.

Then I entered Mission Control again, selecting the recently loaded Activity Monitor.

This takes you back to the screensaver, but the programs behind respond to keys events, so I pressed S to select the ScreenSaver process within the Activity Monitor.

Back to the ScreenSaver, then reopen Mission Control again.

Then I pressed Alt-Cmd-Q to quit the process.

Back to the ScreenSaver, then reopen Mission Control again.

I always had to select the Activity Monitor again, then press Left twice to select the "Force" option and press space.

Ta Da! Your desktop is back!

I got bored of this the third time I had to do it, so I created a simple bash script that will kill the screensaver process for me:

#!/bin/bash

killall -9 -c ScreenSaverEngine

I then used QUICKEYS to assign a keyboard shortcut to run this.

If you don't have QUICKEYS, try QuickSilver - very good shortcut/abbreviation programs.

Now, when the screensaver goes wonky, I just login, then press the keyboard shortcut to run the script, and the screensaver goes away!

Not perfect, and I'm sure Apple will fix this in a future patch, but for now it just might help you to carry on with your day...

Have fun!