October 17, 2006 9:06 AM PDT

Mac OS X 10.4.8 Special Report: Finder Crashes, other issues

by CNET staff

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Likely because of the changes it makes to resolve some longstanding Finder bugs, Mac OS X 10.4.8 appears more susceptible than some other releases to Finder-oriented problems that generally affect some systems and not others.

Among the problem categories:

Finder crashes when control-clicking (right-clicking) items, fix Some users have reported an issue where the Finder crashes when attempting to access contextual menu items by control-clicking (right-clicking) items.

In many cases, this issue is caused by the presence of contextual menu items that may have become problematic under Mac OS X 10.4.8.

Check the following folders:

~/Library/Contextual Menu Items/

/Library/Contextual Menu Items/

for recently added third-party items that could be causing the problem. Try temporarily removing all items, then logging out and back in (or restarting) and check for persistence of the freeze. If the problem is gone, add files back one-by-one to determine the culprit.

General Finder crashes If you are experiencing issues with general Finder crashes -- where the Finder displays an "Application not responding" message and the spinning pinwheel progress indicator is shown when hovering over the Desktop -- you may be able to resolve the issue by simply re-applying the Mac OS X 10.4.8 combo updater (PowerPC or Intel).

Launched inadvertently application sent to background -- fix Some users have experienced an issue where any application that is launched (via the Dock, double-clicking on an icon in the Finder, etc.) is automatically sent to the background. Generally, a just-launched application is put in the foreground as the active app.

In many cases, this issue can be resolved by deleting the file: com.apple.finder.plist from the following directory:

~/Library/Preferences

then restarting.

[note, this is the Library folder inside your home user folder]

Reader reports

Chris writes:

"I am on a MacBook Pro 1.83Ghz with 1.5 GB of RAM running Mac OS X 10.4.8 and am having issues where when I open a program it immediately gets sent to the background, meaning that the Finder remains the active program. It?s really annoying to have to toggle through other open apps to get to the one I just opened.

"My Dock is also doing weird things -- I have it on auto-hide and magnification is on, it's not coming out of hiding and the magnification doesn't work. I've repaired disk permissions, restarted, shut down and nothing seems to be working."

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