Cannot turn Bluetooth off

I cannot turn Bluetooth off on my MacBook Pro. I am running 10.7.4 and the option to turn it off is grayed out, both in the toolbar and in System Preferences. I used Onyx to reset permissions but to no avail. Help, please! I am not using any Bluetooth devices and I'm not sure when or how it got turned back on, but I've always made sure it was turned off. My battery is paying the price!

Solution 1:

If I hold the Option key when I click on the Bluetooth preferences, I get this weird little guy:

Looks like an unlocked lock. When I click it, it asks me to allow com.apple.preferences.Bluetooth.remoteservice to make changes:

After authorizing, the little guy looks like a locked lock and I cannot disable bluetooth:

Hence, perhaps you could do this in reverse order to make the little guy look like an unlocked lock in order to disable bluetooth.

Solution 2:

I would install a clean copy of OS X on to an external drive and test to see if your current OS is corrupt. If the hardware doesn't let you turn it on or off with a clean install, you have saved yourself having to back up and erase the internal drive and know to take it in for repair.

If you find it's corruption, you could then run Migration Assistant to take the data from the internal drive to the new clean OS and re-test before doing the erase and copy of a working OS with your personal data and settings.

Solution 3:

If the issue is corrupted bluetooth preferences, which is my best guess, the following should fix it:

Move the following files to your desktop:

/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Bluetooth.plist
/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Bluetooth.plist.lockfile

Restart your Mac.

This will force your Mac to forget all it's Bluetooth settings so you will have to re-pair all your devices.

Solution 4:

rm -rf /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Bluetooth

It works for me without restarting.