Gray screen instead of login screen

I was hoping you could help with my MacBook Pro issues. First, my left fan was grinding so of course i blew out the fan (they were dusty). The laptop was also getting hot. After login I would also be presented with a white screen and no login screen would show.

I did every troubleshooting technique possible from:

1. repairing permissions - all fixed

2. resetting PRAM - was advised to release after 7 chimes

3. ran Techtool Pro 6 - no problems, not even video (card, memory... nothing)

4. ran Onyx (kinda like CCleaner). I cleaned EVERYTHING

5. took to Apple Store and they ran diagnostics and everything checked out. The fans even checked out

6. I was advised that my Hard drive was failing, but the SMART passed

7. As a last resort, I backed up, erased and reinstalled Snow Leopard thinking it may just be a something I installed (driver or something) causing conflicts. I'm still getting the white screen.

This is the funny thing, I safe boot the laptop and I get the login screen and everything is hunky dory. This happens every time I safe boot (no white screen)

I have done extensive research and tried everything presented to me to no avail.

Scheduled powered events

If you want to find out when your mac is scheduled to wake up or power on because it's missing important events, such as recording television shows, launch Terminal.  Verify using this utility that these Events are getting set properly. There is a command-line tool that can be used to view the existing Events within your Mac's Power manager. To use this tool, launch the "Terminal" utility, located in /Applications/Utilities/Terminal, then enter the following command (you can copy/paste the line below) and press return:

pmset -g sched

The resulting output should look something like this:

Scheduled power events:
[0] wakeorpoweron at 08/05/09 19:56:00 by com.elgato.eyetv

If there are no Events listed here, then there may be a problem with the "Wakein" component, a small script that EyeTV uses to create Events. If there are other Events listed here, these can conflict with some older versions of EyeTV, which cause EyeTV not to place its own Events.

Note: Before you check out this component, you may want to restart your computer and retype pmset -g sched into Terminal. The output may now be there.

You can view the full help page here.

If you're like me, some of your information is in the cloud and some is on your machine, and you don't always remember what is where. That can make it frustrating when you try to use your favorite local search tool to find something. Isn't the whole point of search that you don't have to remember where you put things?

That's where Precipitate comes in. After you install Precipitate, you can use Spotlight to find files online (such as those in your Google Docs list) just as you would find files stored on your Mac. Then, you can open them in your browser with a single click. Once Precipitate is set up, it stays out of your way, regularly getting the latest contents of your documents automatically, so you'll never need to think about it — and if you have Lion or Mountain Lion with iCloud enabled, then you are truly on your your way to being fully organized!

Turn off startup programs to speed things up

If you have too many programs configured to startup at boot, this may slow down your computer.  This is especially true if you keep installing programs over the years.  Disabling startup programs can also help you isolate software conflicts you may be having.  I show you in this post how to disable these.

First, I'll show you how to do this on a Mac:

1. Go to the Apple Menu and choose System Preferences... (you can also click on System Preferences in the Dock, if it's there)

     2. In the System section, Click on Users and Groups

     3. Click on the Login Items tab and highlight the unwanted programs and click the minus button.

In Windows, follow the following instructions:

     1. Click on Start
     2. From the Start Menu Options choose Run
     3. Type “msconfig” without quotes and click okay. This will bring up System Configuration Utility
     4. System Configuration Utility >> Click the tab called Startup
     6. Now you can uncheck any programs that you do not want running upon startup
     7. Once you are done unchecking Click Okay and you will be prompted to restart your computer

Click this link to access a page to help you figure out what startup programs are necessary and not necessary.

Force key repeat

Staring with Lion Apple added a new "feature" to give you alternative characters when you hold down certain keys (this is equivalent to holding down the option key in previous versions of the OS).  To force key repeat, type in the following command in Terminal:

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

You can also achieve this behavior via the Secrets Preference Pane, as illustrated below.

Constant Google popups

If you constantly get a popup that says, "To view this page, you must log in to this area on mail.google.com:443:" when logging into your Google account, follow the instructions below the illustration

open Keychain Access (Applications => Utilities => Keychain Access) Select Passwords on the left.
Delete your Gmail keychain.  Also, if you have any Google related extensions (Google Toolbar, Google Notifier, etc) and your password gets deleted, you may get this popup.

If you not want this behavior, delete your Google add-on.  If you have the Google toolbar installed, open your preferences in Safari and click on Extensions.  Click on Apps on the left and uncheck Gmail

Completely reset Safari to fix problems

If you are constantly having problems with Safari hanging or it just refuses to quit, as was in my case, you'll want to do a FULL reset.  You will be deleting a bunch of preference files, but don't worry, Safari will recreate all these files.  Just follow the instructions below:

Open Terminal - follow this path: Applications => Utilities => Terminal  and paste the commands following the screen shot then hit return.  These commands will save your Safari folder with a date stamp on your Desktop and delete several files.

mv ~/Library/Safari ~/Desktop/Safari-`date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S`; \
rm -Rf ~/Library/Caches/Apple\ -\ Safari\ -\ Safari\ Extensions\ Gallery; \
rm -Rf ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari; \
rm -Rf ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari; \
rm -Rf ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.WebKit.PluginProcess; \
rm -Rf ~/Library/Cookies/Cookies.binarycookies; \
rm -Rf ~/Library/Preferences/Apple\ -\ Safari\ -\ Safari\ Extensions\ Gallery; \
rm -Rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.LSSharedFileList.plist; \
rm -Rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.RSS.plist; \
rm -Rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.plist; \
rm -Rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.WebFoundation.plist; \
rm -Rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.WebKit.PluginHost.plist; \
rm -Rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.WebKit.PluginProcess.plist; \
rm -Rf ~/Library/PubSub/Database; \
rm -Rf ~/Library/Saved\ Application\ State/com.apple.Safari.savedState