A fix for Finder crashing when selecting Applications folder

Apr 30, '03 09:50:00AM

Contributed by: BoardJIVE

Well, being relatively new to OS X, I have been adding software at a blinding pace and it finally caught up with me. Throughout the week, I had been using my Mac without (as usual) a hint of any problems, then all of a sudden it started happening; the Finder started crashing whenever I clicked on the Applications link anywhere in the Finder.

After messing with this for two days, I was ready to give up and reload OS X until another post regarding bad fonts made me think. Could a broken application cause this behavior? Lo-and-behold, that's exactly what it was!

The way I found the application was by using terminal to initially move all the apps from the /Applications folder to my /User/me/applications directory (me being short for my username). Then I just started with the mv command, moving apps by alphabet back to the /Applications directory then clicking on Applications in finder to see if it would crash.

When I moved all the S* apps, then Finder started crashing again. So, I moved S* back, then started moving apps that start with S back individually until I found the culprit, StreamRipperX. Hopefully I will figure out what is causing the clipboard to stop working now.

[robg adds: I'm not sure I'd recommend the use of mv to do this, as you could lose the resource forks to certain applications, which would render them useless. Still, the general troubleshooting technique is good, which is why I chose to post this. Instead of mv, though, CpMac or ditto -v rsrcFork could be used to copy the files out and back (delete all the originals after copying out) while preserving resource fork information. You could also use MvMac to move the files in one step, though it won't copy across volumes and I've heard scattered reports of problems with it...]

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