Jun 29, '04 08:34:00AM • Contributed by: Anonymous
During some heavy work on my PowerBook, I moved some files to my desktop to organize what I was working on, then moved to clean up the clutter in my files I'd made. A few minutes later, the Finder crashed and restarted, then crashed again and restarted, in rapid-fire succession. Finder never stayed up long enough to do anything useful like examine for corrupt files, only long enough to finish starting up. Repeated reboots did nothing, and I could run every other program fine.
The solution (after many hours of research and data backup) was to remove all the files from the Desktop folder in my User account. I had to do this by booting my PowerBook in FireWire target disk mode and using the other computer to delete the files (after making backups first, of course). This should help someone else who can't figure out what to do since the Finder won't stay up long enough to do anything useful.
[robg adds: If you don't have a second machine available, there are a couple of alternatives which should also work. If you have another admin user, you could do a hard restart and login as the other admin user, then use the Terminal to remove (or move) the primary user's desktop files. Alternatively, you should also be able to boot in single user mode (Command-S at startup) and work with the troublesome user files in that mode. However, I haven't tested either of these methods...]
