I have a a MacBook Air that works fine except popping up a shutdown dialog if left untouched for a couple of seconds (seems to be a consistent duration around 3 seconds or so). Hitting Cancel or Esc prevents the shutdown.
If I keep fidgeting around with the keyboard or trackpad, there's no shutdown attempt. I can even place something on the Fn key to keep the OS from shutting down.
It seems like some inactivity timeout etc. gone awry.
When taken to the Genius Bar for initial assessment, the guy there said it was probably the power button needing a replacement. But, I don't think this is the case, as the power button is functioning normally: I can still press it to explicitly initiate a sleep/shutdown.
There's a chance this was triggered by water damage. There was a recent water spill incident to which I acted quickly by turning off the machine + turning it upside down + not using it for a long while + keeping it in a box with rice to absorb any leftover humidity. But even if this is a water damage, I can't imagine a damage that manifests itself with this very narrow malfunction of wanting to shutdown on a short period of in activity. Absolutely nothing else seems to be wrong with the machine.
Any pointers? Any things I can try to (a) diagnose the root cause fix or workaround the problem?
pmset -g sched
to see if there are any scheduled shutdowns. – Nix May 11 '12 at 19:08