Can't click on desktop items

Hi - you're not alone, I get this from time to time - I think it's just the Finder crashing... like you say, an annoying bug!

You don't need to reboot every time this happens though. Right-click on the Finder icon in the Dock and select "Relaunch". If you don't see that option, select "Force Quit…" from the Apple menu, click on Finder in the box that pops up and click the Relaunch button.

Hope that helps

Peter

Peter. Vandoorn wrote:
Hi - you're not alone, I get this from time to time - I think it's just the Finder crashing... like you say, an annoying bug!

It's not a bug. Something is wrong with your OS.
If that happened to me I would immediately fix it. But it does not happen, and therefore is a problem on your machine.
Have you done any troubleshooting? Read the console logs, for example.
Something like that would never see the light of day if it happened on any of my three Macs.

Patrick L. wrote:
I saw some other posts about this, but I was hoping that someone had found a reliable answer for it, especially since it seems like such a stupid bug.

It's not a bug.

Occasionally, I will find that I cannot click on anything on my desktop. However, I can click on the dock and open up a finder window, navigate through my user profile to my desktop folder, and use it that way. The only way to get to my desktop functioning again is by rebooting my machine. This has been happening since I upgraded to Leopard a few months ago, but since I don't leave too much on my desktop, I haven't been sufficiently annoyed by it until now. How many other people are having this problem? Does anyone have a permanent solution?

Have you checked the console logs? Created a new account to isolate your problem? Done any other diagnostic things? Unless you dig deeply into the problem, it is not easy for other users to solve it.

I have had this intermittent problem on versions of Leopard from 10.5.0 through to 10.5.6 (haven't had 10.5.7 on for long enough to tell if it's still happening). Also on 2 different machines - one G5 and one Intel.

Since it's happening on other people's installs too, I would suggest that it is a bug in something or other, the problem is determining where.

Why are you so adamant that it's not a bug, simply because you have never experienced it? Bugs are not simple on/off switches - sometimes they are consistently reproducable, but more often than not they only manifest when a specific set of circumstances arise. In that way, certain lucky people might never encounter them, while others who have the same setup and use the same programs might see them often.

That's what makes this kind of bug so annoying - for me it's very intermittent, so that makes it so much harder to track down! In fact, in this particular case, it's so intermittent and so harmless that I can't be bothered - I just force quit the Finder and all is well again.