No Finder!

I tried every single thing here, hoping that like others, one would work for me. I have a problem, I can't access "Users", even if I try to open a different account, it shows a grey page, I can't select like I used to. I'm really desperate.

Thanks for that! I could not rename my preferences folder so I simply created a new folder called preferences.old, moved all the preferences into it, restarted and viola, the desktop is back. It was pretty easy to move the mission critical preferences back in to the preferences folder and all is working as expected now.

Just for reference, I did to the DivXNetworks fix, but the Finder still did not come up on startup. The funny thing is that it did come up after about 5 minutes each time (but that is a lot of time to wait).

I found what worked was to rename the Preferences file and then restart. My Finder did work immediately after restart; however, yes it is a pain to reconfigure everything.

Hope this helps.

D-

I typed in everything just like you said. It asked for my password (which I assume is the same password that I use for everything else on my HD) and then got a "No such file or directory" message.

Is this whole Finder mix up also why I have nothing on my Desktop? Just curious...

Please help.

Eric is a genius. Terminal always wanted a password but would not allow entry so hooked up the laptop and no problem from then on

I'm getting "no such file or directory".

After cutting and pasting. Any ideas?

can you select your drive and set it to private so spotlight does not index it?
This will delete the indexing file and if there are problems in it, could this cause finder to hang? Not sure.
There is an issue with spotlight in that some items are set to invisible when a drive is indexed. Setting the drive to private will prevent spotlight from indexing it.
As I have not heard of problems with finder not working (although on my wife's computer finder leaves a blank white square sometimes when closing the finder window).
I suspect that indexing the drive may be the cause as there are known issues with spotlight making drives invisible or setting folders to invisible.

I had a similar problem, Finder wasn't loading at startup, I had to manually start Finder and wait around 30 seconds for it to start. I didn't have a Divxnetworks entry, so that wasn't the cause, after working back in my mind, I discovered the my new Western Digital drive software was causing the problem.

In /Library/StartupItems/ I had an entry for WDNotifier, once I got rid of this everything is back to normal.

Hope that helps anybody else in a similar situation.