Finder hang in Leopard

October 23rd, 2008 at 21:49 · Filed Under Call Me a Geek, Hacking, Mac OS X 

When I returned home this evening, LA told me her applications had hung. I checked and found not only that, the Finder was not responsive too. I had no choice but to power off and to restart the Mac Mini again. This had also affected my user account. The Finder had failed to launch after login and the Dock did not appear as well. But fortunately root user account was not badly affected.

I Googled and found some articles and solutions here, here and here. I exhausted all the methods and I did not have DivXNetworks and ApplicationEnhancer.bundle in the directories mentioned in these links. I decided to go my own way.

What I did was to delete everything that was related to DivX. Since I did not have DivXNetworks, so I removed DivX folders in “/Library/Application Support” and “~/Library/Application Support” and also the DivX programs in Applications.

After the deletion, Finder still could not launch properly. I launched Console.app to examine system logs and found some errors in cache files com.apple.LaunchedServices*. I removed everything with com.apple.LaunchedServices in /Library/Caches.

Viola! Everything is back to normal again. DivX is a third party enhancement software and is not very stable. It seems like DivX has messed up with the system caches and somehow prevented Finder to launch.

I have spent two and half hours mingling with this problem. I hope my experience will save some of your time if you have the same problem as mine. I am going to take my supper.

Good luck!

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