A possible fix for high Finder CPU usage

Dec 13, '04 09:45:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

My 12" Powerbook with 10.3.6 recently started running its fan on high constantly, and draining the battery within 45 minutes, and shutting down with no notice. Activity Monitor showed the Finder eating upwards of 90% of the CPU activity. Force quitting the Finder temporarily solved the problem, but it would quickly come back when the Finder was relaunched.

I ran every utility I could think of and tried every tip from MacOSXHints that seemed relevant: re-installed 10.3.6 from the combo updater; reset the NVRAM in open firmware; deinstalled every extras I had running -- all to no avail. What finally made it stop was creating (and logging in as) a new user. Armed with this information, I moved my main user's entire Library -> Preferences folder to the Desktop (so it rebuilt all new preferences), and low and behold, this fixed it too.

Then I added select preferences back in groups. At one point, the problem reappeared and I narrowed it down to one of the group of com.apple.finder.plist, com.apple.loginwindow.plist, and com.apple.systemuiserver.plist.

I couldn't narrow it down any further, but the problem has now been gone for a week, and hasn't come back. Hopefully this will help someone in the same boat...

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20041209181913938