Spinning rainbow cursor
The spinning rainbow cursor in Mac OS X indicates that some task is blocking your ability to interact with a program.
In most cases, the spinning rainbow cursor -- which looks like a rainbow-colored disc -- should disappear after a just few seconds.
When you see the spinning rainbow cursor and cannot wait for it to go away, you should be able to Switch to another application in Mac OS X and do some work there. Mac OS X is very good about being able to run several applications and once, and letting you switch between them quickly. If you are unable to switch by any of the normal methods, then some process may be interfering with the system. While this is exceedingly unlikely, it can and does happen from time to time -- and it's generally not something harmful.
If you have switched to another program and the original program has been unresponsive for more than a few minutes (2-5 minutes, perhaps), then you may wish to force quit that program. There are several ways to safely Force quit an application in Mac OS X. If you force quit the program, though, you lose any unsaved data. If you have saved the data you were working on in that application, you should not lose it. Force quitting one program should not affect another, unless you are quitting a program in the "Mac OS X Classic environment".
If your computer is unresponsive and you are not able to identify and force quit an application that is causing a problem, you may wish to try to log out or restart your computer. It is always safer (for the computer and your data) to try to instruct the system to log out your account or restart from the keyboard or the graphical user interface on-screen, rather than pressing the power button on the computer.
For frequent lock-ups involving the spinning rainbow cursor, please contact us so that we can assist in troubleshooting. Frequent and persistent rainbow cursors are not a normal event in Mac OS X, and should be dealt with quickly because they may point to other underlying problems.
