For the past few months, I have been slowly driven mad by a mysterious menu bar item on my Mac. I had no clue what I had installed that would have added this to my menu bar. I already had iStat Menus installed and was quiet happy with it displaying the info I wanted.

The little fucker that's been driving me mad!

After a bit, I decided to enlist some help to figure this out. I asked my Mac expert friend and she was clueless. So, I decided to enlist the help of John & Dave from the Mac Geek Gab podcast from The MacObserver. For weeks we tweeted & emailed back and forth. I followed their advice, look here, look there, and sent them log files. They were stumped. Completely and utterly. I stumped the guys from Mac Geek Gab. I did it.

I assured them also that it wasn’t anything to do with iStat Menus (great piece of software from bjango).

After a few tweets not even an hour ago, they had me email them a list of items in a few folders (LaunchAgents, LaunchDaemons, & StartupItems). I sent off the list to them and decided that I’d Google “mysterious menu bar item” one more time.

A-HA! A new post from the Apple Support forums from the end of January 2011! And in that thread there was a link to another thread in the Apple Support forums. I read and I read. BOOM! Check Intego’s VirusBarrier. After a recent update to their software people started seeing this mysterious menu bar item that showed network traffic. HEY! That’s what MY mysterious menu bar item was.

In the Preferences for VirusBarrier X6 click on the “Traffic” tab. In the bottom section there is a checkbox called “Display network traffic in menu bar”. I unchecked that and BAM! The mysterious menu bar item was GONE from my menu bar.

DAMN YOU INTEGO! DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL! You drove me crazy over the period of months trying to figure this fucking thing out!!!! YOU BASTARDS!

John & Dave from Mac Geek Gab, THANK YOU for all of your help! Please share the info I emailed you with the rest of your listeners!