Blurry/pixelated icons at random in Finder windows

Thanks for your note, but FYI, the problem you're experiencing has nothing to do with the issue being discussed here, which is specific to icons. Since you mention that text is also blurry on your screen, the problem is almost surely one of two things:

1. You're running your LCD display at a non-native resolution. If that's the case, the solution is simple: just change your display resolution to the maximum possible, and the blurriness will vanish. Things will also be noticeably smaller onscreen, though.

2. There is a hardware problem with your monitor or graphics card.

And also, just FYI, it's bad form to post your email address on a forum such as this one and ask for replies. Much better to return to the forum and look for replies here, so that others can benefit from the exchange of information.

But again, in this particular case, if your issue persists, please start a new thread, since blurry text is not a symptom of the issue being discussed here.

Have a great Thanksgiving!

O.K., I think I may have figured out what's so unusual about my system that's causing or contributing to the issue. I have several folders full of thousands of images -- stock images, Photoshop images, etc.: I build websites for a living -- one of which I keep in the dock. Until recently, I used Graphic Converter to browse and open these images. Graphic Converter's browse window adds custom icons and large preview thumbnails to every image it finds. In my case that amounted to tens of thousands of custom icons. I never connected it to the issue at hand because it wasn't those icons that were blurred under Snow Leopard; rather, it was random application and document icons.

As some of you may know, however, adding custom icons and fixed-size previews to files has an annoying side-effect under Snow Leopard and Leopard: it causes the Finder's own extra-large previews not to work. So I finally got sick of it and used CocoThumbX to remove all of the custom icons and previews from all of the image files in the folder I use most frequently: the one I keep in the dock.

Ever since that purge my icons are crisp, even when I do things that once triggered the issue 100% of the time in the past, such as download new programs.

I realize we've all proposed slightly different methods of how best to trigger the issue, but do all of us by chance have docked folders full of hundreds (or thousands) of files with custom icons and/or previews?

P.S. Maulrat1967 and others have mentioned "custom icons" as being a potential cause of the issue earlier in the thread. Since CandyBar was often mentioned in the same post, I thought you were referring to custom icons for Mac OS X-created folders and programs, not just custom icons for images and the like. My apologies for misunderstanding you! I have never used CandyBar, and I never dreamed that the simply act of having docked folders full of image files with custom icons could be a cause of the issue.

Do you keep any of your folders of CBR and CBZ files in the dock? I still have several other folders filled with image files containing custom icons and thumbnail previews. When I stripped the icons and previews from the single such folder I keep in the dock, though, the problem vanished. I presume that the dock has to cache each and every one of those custom icons for its menus, leading to the problem.

But I think having folders full of custom-icon-bearing files elsewhere on your machine shouldn't pose a problem.

I actually don't have a developer account, so the best I can do is write to Apple via their feedback page. If others in this thread can confirm this trigger and fix, perhaps one of them could send Apple the information via an official channel.