[Macpartners] Re: Macpartners Digest, Vol 17, Issue 3

[Eric Zelman]

Janet-

Does this happen for other users? I can't emphasize enough how many 
times logging in as another user reveals that there are some corrupt 
files in the user's home, and that simply isolating them is the key 
(watch for date modified, use lsof from the terminal).

On Oct 7, 2004, at 12:02 PM, macpartners-request at mit.edu wrote:

> 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
Eric Zelman
Systems Engineer
Apple
68 Mt. Hope Ave.
Providence, RI 02906

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