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<div><font color="#000000">Hi,</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">I have a PowerMac G4 with 733 Mhz processor
and 768 MB of memory running OS X 10.3.5.</font><br>
<font color="#000000"></font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">Last week I tried to install FireFox but
the installation aborted. After this, I clicked the main Applications
folder to see if Firefox was installed. This caused the Finder to
hang, with a repeated series of 4 chugging noises. No matter whether I
single click on the Apps folder icon, or select the folder in the Go
menu, the folder starts to appear -- An empty Applications
folder window opens, and the count of the number of items in the
folder appears at the bottom of the window. Then the chugging starts,
and if I try to click anywhere else, the spinning beachball
appears and I have to force restart.</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">The chugging stops if I'm using the
Activity Monitor but starts up as soon as I click out of Activity
Monitor, so I have to restart. During the chugging, the Activity
Monitor showed "Finder hung" and added a line below the
Finder line, also in red, labeled "system
server".</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">Fortunately, I was given a workaround for
using the Go menu to access items such as Disk
Utility: </font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">Go menu>Go to folder.... In the window I
enter: /Applications/Utilities/. This works most of the time. After
one failure, I now type: ?Applications/Utilities/Disk Utilities/. This
gives me access to any of the Utilities without getting close enough
to the Apps folder to hang the Finder.</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000"><br>
Here's what I've tried, in this order:</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">- Deleted every FireFox related file I
could find</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">- Ran Repair permissions</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">- Ran fsck -f twice</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">- Deleted file
apple.com.finder.plist</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">- Deleted file .DS_Store</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">- Reset PRAM</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">- Tried to find patterns in the system log
but can't tell what repeating patterns mean--ISP connection
attempts??</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">Everything else in the Finder, including
the Apps folder in my Home directory, behaves normally, and every
other process seems to work OK. All the apps I can open from the Dock
work fine. I've used Software Update and installed Virex 7 updates
successfully.</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">Because I'm running OS X 10.3.5,
reinstalling from the 10.3 disks requires that I do Archive and
Install instead of Easy Install. Not sure how much manual cleanup from
"Previous System Folder" is involved after
installation.</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">Someone suggested that I may be able to
reinstall just the Finder, as described in</font>
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=42929<font
color="#000000">. This article seems aimed at machines that came with
10.2 installed. My machine is much older than that; it came with OS X,
the first release.</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">Someone else suggested I spend the money
for help from Apple, since it's such a peculiar problem.</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">Any ideas?</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">Thanks,</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">Janet</font></div>
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