I got fed up of the old spinning beach-ball problem with a DVD that I had just inserted, so I thought I'd try something better than a reboot. You need to sudo to root for this one to work. Once you've done that, then type:
% ps aux| grep Finder.appGet the process ID (the first set of numbers in the output) and then type:
% kill -HUP 1234Replace 1234 with the actual process ID of the Finder from the first command. This will re-initialise Finder and gets rid of the beach-ball. BTW, this was on 10.2.4, so some of these Finder bugs are probably fixed, buts it's a tip worth knowing.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20031216122211297