[Macpartners] OS X Finder hanging problem

[Janet Littell]

Hi,
I have a PowerMac G4 with 733 Mhz processor and 768 MB of memory 
running OS X 10.3.5.

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.

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".

Fortunately, I was given a workaround for using the Go menu to access 
items such as Disk Utility: 
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.

Here's what I've tried, in this order:

- Deleted every FireFox related file I could find
- Ran Repair permissions
- Ran fsck -f twice
- Deleted file apple.com.finder.plist
- Deleted file .DS_Store
- Reset PRAM
- Tried to find patterns in the system log but can't tell what 
repeating patterns mean--ISP connection attempts??

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.

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.

Someone suggested that I may be able to reinstall just the Finder, as 
described in http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=42929. 
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.

Someone else suggested I spend the money for help from Apple, since 
it's such a peculiar problem.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Janet
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