Old automount entries can cause application hangs

Jan 29, '04 10:06:00AM

Contributed by: kirkmc

I had an interesting problem yesterday. All of a sudden, several of my applications were hanging. I got the spinning beachball, and had to force quit them. But it took several force quits to kill the applications, either from the Dock or from the Force Quit Application window (Command-Option-Escape). This first began with Word freezing, when I tried to insert a graphic from a file. Well, I thought, this is just Word ... but then it happened when trying to use the Acrobat PDF Writer to create a PDF from a Word document. Then other applications started hanging, including the Finder.

One thing I noticed was that the hanging occurred in operations which should have displayed an Open or Save dialog. I'll spare some of the troubleshooting operations I went through to see if the problem was related to specific application updates (the iCal update, or another update of a pre-release version of a network utility).

The solution came when I recalled a similar problem with OS 9 hanging because of aliases to recent servers in the System Folder's Recent Servers folder. So I fired up the Terminal and went to /var/automount/Network, and, indeed, found a half-dozen directories there that corresponded to different servers. After deleting these, everything worked fine.

I haven't seen this problem reported elsewhere, but it's certainly something to look for. If an application hangs when it's about to display an Open or Save dialog, it could be that the Finder is looking for those recent servers before displaying the dialog, so when you click the Network icon in the sidebar they display.

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