I think I see the problem. You dragged a special character from the character palette to the desktop. When you drag text from any app to the desktop, it creates a "text clipping" file, named with the text you dragged (or as much as will fit in a name). The Finder, however, has some issues displaying file names with certain "weird" characters (sometimes). My guess is that's why it keeps quitting. Whenever it loads, it encounters this text clipping with a "weird" name, and can't deal with it.
So, you need to delete or rename this file. But obviously, you can't do that with the Finder. So we need to find another way.
You could do this with many apps, like Terminal or Script Editor, but the issue there is that you might not be able to access them without the Finder.
You didn't mention what version of OS X you're running. If you're using 10.4 Tiger, click the Spotlight icon in the upper-right, search for Terminal, and load it. Type (or paste in) these two lines, and hit Return.
cd ./Desktop
ls
This should display a list of the files on the desktop. If you see the file you want to delete, type in this, and hit Return:
mv "./<name_of_text_clipping>.textClipping" friendly_new_name.textClipping
Replace "<name_of_text_clipping>.textClipping" with, naturally, the name you saw in the list before. This will rename the file "friendly_new_name.textClipping". After that, I expect the Finder to function normally, so you can delete the file from there if you want.
You could also delete the file directly from Terminal, but I don't like to instruct people to do anything too destructive from Terminal, because...well, it's scary. Deleting things from Terminal leaves a lot of room for little mistakes with big consequences, so I prefer to just rename or move when possible, and delete from the Finder.
If you're not running Tiger, let me know, and we'll find another way to get Terminal loaded.
Thanks in advance,
