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There is a yellow tooltip stuck and it floats above all other windows. I do not know from what program it came.

How can I get rid of it without restarting my computer?

EDIT:

Offending tooltip

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what does the tooltip say or can you post an image? – Stu Wilson Jan 23 '12 at 14:48
@StuWilson: Done! Should have included it from the beginning... :) – benregn Jan 23 '12 at 14:51

4 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

There is a way to find out what application is responsible, if you have the developer tools installed.

In versions of Mac OS X before 10.6, the Quartz Debug tool had a Window List which lists every window and the application it belongs to. Unfortunately, this has been hidden in later versions, but it can be enabled (as I just found through this article: 10.6: Quartz Debug 4.0 Secrets) — run the shell command

defaults write com.apple.QuartzDebug QDVisibleClientIdentifiers -array-add -string QDWindowInfoClient

and then launch Quartz Debug. You will be able to browse all the windows and see images of each, push the “Reveal“ button to highlight it, or look at the heights to find windows that are of the right size.

This setting takes effect until you close the window. The linked article has suggestions for permanently enabling a way to bring up that window, but they don't seem to work on my Lion system and I haven't found any newer discussion. This rather suggests Apple thinks these tools shouldn't be readily accessible, so play with this at your own risk...

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You can often make it go away just by quitting the application. If that doesn't solve it, you may have to use ⌥+⌘+esc to relaunch the Finder.

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I would do that, but I just don't know what program spawned it. – benregn Jan 23 '12 at 14:47
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The way I solved it was to log out and in again. Not the ideal solution but I guess that when you don't know what program it belonged to, there aren't many options.

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up vote -1 down vote

The program was "Eclipse" according to the theme named "Solarized Dark" - so java issue then :P

or iTerm uses the same theme.

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Actually don't have Eclipse installed at all. I'm using the Solarized theme in pretty much all places that support color themes, e.g. Terminal and Sublime Text 2. – benregn Jan 23 '12 at 14:58
oh well, that doesn't help then in any way to differentiate which program was causing the issue since it's probably the same theme set loaded across different programs. There woudl have been no way then to find out which program caused the issue without closing each program program individually or en masse whcih was what you did when you logged out. – Stu Wilson Jan 23 '12 at 15:01

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