We set our Macs to require a password when woken from sleep or the screensaver.

Around the beginning of November several of our 10.8.x Mac users started to advise that they were seeing the dreaded spinning beachball/pinwheel when trying to wake their Macs.

It appears we were not alone in this issue.

As you can see from my messages in the thread, I tried various things & it didn’t help that this coincided with us updating our Mac Servers to 10.9 & an odd issue where on our DNS some .local zones just “appeared.”

Anyways, it was tracked down to an issue with the showInputMenu key in the com.apple.loginwindow.plist being set to true & a recent update.

As we deployed this setting via MCX through the JSS we needed to change the value from true to false as shown below:

Display Name: Login Window Show Input Menu – User Level
Application Domain: com.apple.loginwindow
Key Name: showInputMenu
Key Type: boolean
Key Value: false

If you’ve got this issue & set the showInputMenu key via a script, then run the below once per Mac & it should delete the key out of the com.apple.loginwindow.plist.