Juan Monroy

Since I bought the 2009 iMac 21″, I had noticed that the computer was running “hot.”

Looking at the Activity Monitor utility, the CPU would be running really high and applications would run pretty slow. One process in particular, launchd, would be taking up nearly 15% of the CPU, which seemed very strange considering no other application took up so much processing power.

With the increased processor load, Mail would often crash over and over again. Also, applications that used audio or video would often hang even before they opened and would never respond. (By audio and video applications, I mean iTunes, Quicktime Player, Airfoil, Pulsar, Radioshift and even VLC.) I also tried to activate my Firewall, and System Preferences would hang, too. Clearly, something is wrong.

Looking at the Console utility, I noticed that one entry that came up repeatedly in the diagnostic logs: Adobe Version Cue. It also noted that the parent process of Version Cue was “launchd.” After digging around on the Internet, I saw that many bulletin boards recommended uninstalling the “Version Cue Server. It turns out that very few firms actually use this functionality.

In Applications/Utilities/Adobe Installers, you can add/remove specific components of Adobe CS3. So I had this utility uninstall Adobe CS3 Version Cue Server, and just like that the Activity Monitor Dock gauge went down to a nice low reading.

So there you go, if you’re having problems with media applications hanging, a runaway launchd process, and you have Adobe Creative Suite installed, try uninstalling the Version Cue Server.