Usually when I create a mantra render node a status comes up showing how many renders left and how much time has elapsed, but now it doesn't happen, I've deleted Houdini and reinstalled it but it loads the same preferences as before , where are the preferences kept on a mac? Or is this something else?

Turns out It only shows when rendering a sequence, pain because i can't see the status on a single given image, I'm still having some preference issues though, how do you reset them on a mac?

$HOME/Library/Preferences/houdini/X.Y

For rendering a single frame, you can turn off background rendering on the Mantra node.