Ongoing Snow Leopard issue: Finder Application cannot be opened (-10810)
Users experience a freeze in Finder when attempting to search or work with files on their shared drives. When they Force Quit (relaunch) Finder, they receive the (-10810) error with the message that the Finder application cannot be opened. Users are forced to then reboot their machines to continue use. Apple Support Discussions forum user "fitzyjoe" reports:
I'm having the same problem - When I try to "Connect to Server" from the Finder. I select afp:/// . Then, I'm prompted to authenticate. Authentication seems to complete successfully and an entry is created in /Volumes. If I try to expand the volume or do an "ls -al" in Terminal, the Finder freezes. I right-click on Finder and choose to restart it. Then, I'm hosed... Can't start a new Finder with "The Application Finder can't be opened -10810" message. If I wait long enough, the Finder restarts. The shared drive on my server is a Drobo.
Solutions?
At this point, it still looks like people are having this issue and no official fix has been released from Apple. That being said,
Mac OS X 10.6.2 has seen several beta releases to developers and should be available for download soon. To further the hopes of users that have been faced with this issue, ASD user "alleksu" posted this response from Apple about a filed bug for this problem:
"This is a follow up to Bug ID# 7256664. After further investigation it has been determined that this is a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering. This issue has been filed in our bug database under the original Bug ID# 7152276. The original bug number being used to track this duplicate issue can be found in the State column, in this format: Duplicate/OrigBug#."
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Ultimately the problem is often due to third party software. We had scores of computers going down with this error recently, and it turned out to be a problem with the Altiris software my organization used to keep track of computers. In other cases it has been other programs, but, I believe, the problem is always due to some software spawning many processes until the OS reaches its limit of allowed number of processes.
If you have the excellent utility "Onyx" installed (which you should) you can try some cache cleaning using it and rebuild the launch services database. That seems to have worked in many cases.
The real fix is to find the offending software. We ultimately did this by going to the terminal and typing "sudo ps -ef" which helps you find which process is being spawned many times.
Then delete the problem application, or at least clean its prefs/caches/etc.
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by zink_dotmac
November 3, 2009 1:55 PM PST
- This has happened to me four times since clean install upgrading to Snow Leopard a few weeks back. Three times while trying to disconnect MobileMe iDisk, today for the first time trying to disconnect USB flash memory (FAT formatted). This particular USB memory had not been mounted since the SL installation.
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(4 Comments)This never happened on the same computer in either 10.4 or 10.5. Excellent stability prior to 10.6 installation (apart from first few months with 10.5).
First indication of the problem is the failure to disconnect/eject the volume. Force eject does not work and soon the spinning beach ball appears in the Finder. Other apps work, at least for a while. Typing (sudo) "ps -ef" in the Terminal gave me no clue towards the process culprit.
Restarting Finder then fails with the -10810 message.
Console Diagnostic Messages shows:
Unmount Assistant [pid]:
com.apple.message.signature: Unknown Process
com.apple.message.result: noop
com.apple.message.domain: com.apple.volumeUnmounts.openNonGUI
com.apple.message.domain_scope: com.apple.volumeUnmounts.openNonGUI
Not very helpful to me.
After restarting from an externa FW disk with 10.5.8, Disk First Aid reports a few errors that needs to be fixed.
White iMac 24", conected to the internet through an Airport Express. Only a few handful applications like, Firefox, Safari, iTunes, iWork, Adium, VirtualBox/Ubuntu and Spotify. No Amadeus Pro or Altiris.