Mac Tip: Fixing The Perpetually Crashing Finder
October 15th, 2007
Got into a rather freaky situation yesterday on the Mac Mini. Essentially, the Finder kept crashing, repeatedly, about a second after launching. The effect is quite disturbing – everything on the desktop vanishes and reappears again, and access to anything Finder-related is only available for the brief second the Finder is making the decision to crash. Using applications is hampered significantly as with every crash the application you’re in loses focus.
The solution was thankfully found at Mac OS X Hints. Basically, a corrupted file on the Desktop can cause this (I’m thinking the icon) and every time the Finder tried to display it – crash. So the solution was to move everything on the Desktop into a different folder, since I wasn’t sure which file it was.
I tried to do just that but this became a video game of trying to select icons fast enough before the Finder crashed. No dice.
Luckilly, even in this Finder-hobbled state I could launch programs. I fired up Adobe Bridge which allowed me to move files independent of the Finder. I guess I could have also used the Terminal but my brain was too crusty to remember how to move files with spaces in their names (I did remember the mv command though). Anyhow, as soon as I got the offending file off of the Desktop, the crashing stopped.
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Gotta love that a pesky icon could be the culprit..haha. Are you using crazy animated icons or something?
I remember my old cure-all for freaky make problems used to be “zapping the pram”. I dunno if that is any help these days. Thank goodness my Mac has been mostly stable. I don’t think I have Adobe Bridge.
No animated icons – I think it was the preview image that Adobe sometimes spits out on its files.
There’s a pretty long list of “voodoo” type things that can be done on the Mac these days – zap the PRAM, repair permissions, boot up from something else and run Disk First Aid – but I have run into situations where Disk Warrior was the only solution – always for some disk directory corruption stuff.