Frozen desktop and finder not responding. Help!

[shawnbrose]

When i log onto my old eMac under my profile, it loads the wallpaper and the toolbar but nothing else. Whenever the mouse passes over the desktop itself, it just turns into that little pinwheel that signifies a problem. Whenever I try to use Finder, it locks the computer up completely. All applications on the toolbar work, including firefox and iTunes, but since Finder is broken I can't use things like external drives. Is there any way to get my computer to halt whatever process is confusing my poor finder without hurting my iTunes?

 

[ra3ndy]

Things to try, in roughly this order:

1)If you can get to System preferences, create another account to test for the same problem.
(if there's already another user account on your mac, hold down shift at boot to get into safe mode, which disables auto-login)

2) If you can get to Disk Utility, Repair Permissions.

3) Reboot into Single User Mode (hold Apple+S after boot chime)
when the black screen w/ white text is done loading, type fsck -fy and hit Return
This will run the file system check. If it finishes the whole process, run it again until it only reports "Volume appears to be OK".

4) After completing a successful fsck, type mount -uw / and hit return. Then, type rm -rf /Users/yourname/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Finder.plist and hit Return. Reboot & log back in as your user and see if that helped. Note: BE VERY CAREFUL WITH rm -rf !! Carelessness will wipe your hard drive! be sure to replace yourname with the name of your Home folder

5) If that doesn't help, it's probably time for an Archive & Reinstall from your system disk.

Good Luck!

 

[canoesteve]

HI,
So I have/HAD a 'finder not responding problem'. Almost.
...If I wait 30 minutes I do get a finder populated window.
But as soon as I try to use/do finder...
I have a long wait (+5minutes or more) 'not responding'.
Wait for a long long time and finder is back.
I'm using Leopard. I asked 'what changed', but don't know.
I worked for hours trying all things to get finder back to normal
but no luck! I didn't want to do a restore

I verified that it is NOT finder itself but something associated with my account.
Verified finder works just fine for another user.
Tried removing all items from $HOME/Desktop.
Tried removing the pref com.apple.finder.plist
Tried applejack.
Tried (re)moving all Cache
Tried booting in safe mode.
Looked at logs files but couldn't see anything that stuck out.

FINALLY.. I noticed a few "strange" entries in the toolbar (left panel).
I removed them and now finder is back to normal! Strange!
This was a very frustrating experience and time consuming. Scary.