Q: Blurry/pixelated icons at random in Finder windows

I belong to MANY tech forums ( MacCast, TWiT Town Commons, etc. ) and I've seen lots of people refer to a "clean" install ( using the quotes ). These people are using that term to refer to the process of booting from the Snow Leopard disc, using Disk Utility to re-format ( wipe ) the main boot drive, clean installing Snow Leopard and then doing an upgrade install of Leopard over that fresh SL install. That's not what I would call a true clean install of Lion. Of course, what you performed is truly a clean install ... I just wanted to make sure we were both coming from the same intial state as we comparte notes ( which obviously we are ).

For the record, I must confess my previous post was just a tad misleading, Like you, after install I did instal a good amount of software ( both from the app store and third party ) and then re-booted the system. So, even though my machine has been running since last Thursday, it is also NOT the initial boot from install. I can't say I was really paying much attention to the icons when I was installing all that software so it is quite possible that my machine experienced the same thing yours did while installing software. But like yours .. no fuzzy icons since ( fingers crossed )

FYI, I haven't experienced any finder crashes or beachballs ( my machine is slightly older ... Fall 2008 iMac ) but the one thing I have observed is a launchpad bug. I've found that if I am dragging an icon from one page to another, and my finger slips off the mouse, sometimes the icon will be stuck in that spot on the screen for awhile. If I exit launchpad and wait awhile it gets back to normal ... weird.

Anyway, thanks for your input.

We are on the same page.

In fact, if you look at my original post about the install: https://discussions.apple.com/message/15713338#15713338

I state:

"This was a clean install. Backed up my Snow Leopard drive, booted from the backup drive, wiped out the Snow Leopard drive, installed Lion to the cleaned drive."

I thought I made it pretty clear how I "clean" installed Lion.

Not to nit-pic, but unless you iMac date is a typo, 8/2006 (Aug. 2006) predates Fall of 2008 by a couple of years. I ordered my Mac Pro a day after it was announced at the 2006 WWDC. The first Intel based Mac Pro.

At any rate. The Finder crashes are not the only buggy thing I have seen. Some drop-down sheets display overlapping controls. I don't see that very often, but it has happened a couple of times. iTunes has crashed once just because I was clicking on a song to play. Plus a few other stray hic-ups.

Since your system has been running longer than mine, your giving me hope that maybe, just maybe the fuzzy icon thing is gone. At least until the OS gets clogged with more junk and has to be clean installed again.

I hate to say it, but it's looking like OS X needs to be re-installed every so often like Windows does. At least not as often.

Yeah I meant to say " my machine is slightly NEWER"  LOL

But like you said we are on the same page with everything else ... I just never bothered to check back to your original post. I see now why you had a surprised reaction LOL

So I wonder if the Clean Install is the solution to the Blury Icon thing no matter what OS you run. If wiping out a Snow Leopard boot drive and re-installing Snow Leopard would solve the problem for the folks who are not thinking of upgrading to Lion or can't.

My MacBook has "almost" the original install of Snow Leopard (after being upgraded in place from Leopard). I installed a larger HDD in the machine a year after getting it. So the OS from Leopard to Snow Leopard has been on that machine for over 4 years.

I'm thinking that even Mac OS's get full of garbage over time. I've installed so many apps like Carbonite and then uninstalled them. I just wonder if something I installed caused this blury icon bug, even if it's an app like CandyBar, and the OS just needs to be cleaned out every so often.

My Mac Pro had so much stuff in launchd's XML file that wasn't cleaned up properly after uninstalling apps (sometimes I didn't uninstall the correct way), that I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't something bad either in launchd's data or some other system daemon that was causing the problem.

Time will tell I suppose. (Just kind of thinking out loud here)

I've put together a small app that cleans all affected icon caches automatically for you upon launch - then restarts Dock and Finder - very simple and very quick. You can add it to your Useraccounts startup objects so that it is executed automatically upon login.

http://cl.ly/3T1p3C2J2O2E0b2K190W

hope this helps

Here's an updated version:

http://cl.ly/2o1O3W2j0N0l37411x3c

it includes a deamon script that regularly deletes the specified caches in a 20 seconds interval - if you add it to your startup items it might be able to keep the blurring effect from appearing in the first place.... *fingers crossed*

PS: You have to install the watch binary for the script to work - check this tutorial on how to do this:

http://osxdaily.com/2010/08/22/install-watch-command-on-os-x/

Appreciate the effort jaba but as we've been over before in this thread, logging out and back in or restarting the computer fixes the blurring without any other cache clean required or anything else having to run at login.. The second version MAY be something to look into for those still running Snow Leopard as it would continually clean the cache, but I would be surprised if the watch command still works in Lion.

I still have had NO occurence of the issue on my clean install of Lion ... and this after at least a week now of running the software I believe triggered the issue in the past.

after 4 hours of running that script still no blurry icons. I'll keep you informed.

Well, spoke too soon. This morning they returned. Logged out and logged back in and it's fixed. Jaba are you running Snow Leopard or Lion ? And, will this script run in a standard acct or only as admin ?

I'm running 10.6.8 but unfortunately after 6 hours of running that script the icons started to blur nonetheless - it happened when I opened a folder that has about 1000 icons in it and started to scroll down - as I was half way through they suddenly got all pixelated/invisible and stuff.

Restarting the Finder and dock fixes the problem temporarily but as soon as more than a few hundred icons have been loaded into the cache the issue starts happening again. I suppose the problem is that the app icon cache is loaded into the RAM during runtime and can't be removed so quitting and relaunching said app is the only way to really fix it - at least for a few minutes.

I'm seriously considering downgrading to 10.5 again - i mean *** Apple - after more than 1 year still no fix? That's not what I call good customer support...

PS: I'm thinking about making a clean install and migrating my old user to the new system - has anyone tried that approach?

Honestly, before "downgrading", I would suggest doing a clean install of Snow Leopard. That will probably mean installing Leopard first, but if you do a backup with SuperDuper! so that you can boot the backup. Then you will be running Snow Leopard and can probably do a clean install of Snow Leopard without having to have Leopard installed somewhere first.

A clean install is still a difficult process since you will have to re-register all your apps, but it might just clean up the blurring icon issue. If not completely, for a long time. Maybe not at all though.

After my clean install of Lion, I haven't seen any blurry icons and it's been a couple of weeks now. I have a folder of Astronomy Pic's of the Day images with well over 1000 files. All have been given thumbnail icons (no white border) and I can scroll though all those icons without any issues.

The fact that Apple has not "fixed" the problem makes me wonder if it's not a programming issue, but a setting in the system that is causing the blurry icons. Usually, Apple fixes issues that enough people have complained about. This issue has a strong following of folks that are seeing the problem. So I have to assume that Apple has looked into it and found it not to be a programming issue. Of course, they have been quite about a lot of other fixes that they have fixed over the years. So who knows...

As far as migrating data from the system that is showing blurry icons to a clean installed system. I have not done that, but I would be concerned that what ever is causing the blurry icons would not migrate over with the rest of the data. I get the feeling that the issue is a weird/corrupted setting. Although I could easily be wrong about that too.

Like I said in my last post, I was running beautifully until I started importing new comics files into ComicBookLover. That app is a viewer/organizer for cbz and cbr files ( actually rar and zip archives that have different extensions ) ... think iTunes for digital comics. When you import these archives into CBL, the app gererates an icon for that specific archive ( a thumbnail of the first image in the archive ) so that when you are looking at these archive files in the finder they appear as a bunch of Comic Book Covers.

I have long suspected that something in this process triggers the blurred icon effect ... may not be the only cause, but it sure seems like it is doing SOMETHING to start it. Perhaps these thumbnail icons are of a format that Snow Leopard and Lion do not like and trying to view them in the finder corrupts a cache of some sort.

How many comics do you have in that app? I've got 1,231 images stored in that APOD folder all with thumbnails for icons and I have yet to see any blurry icons. My Mac has currently been up for 9 1/2 days (since the last reboot).

I also have CandyBar that has thousands and thousands of icons in it and since that weird start (after clean install of Lion but before a reboot), I haven't had any problems with blurry icons.

Currently I have well over 25,000 loaded into the database. But the thumbnails load fine within the app. It is only when the file icons are viewed through Finder that the blurring occurs .... and then only after I have used the app to import new files to the database and thus generate/change new icons for archive files that had generic ones before. Thus my theory that the creation of these icons does something to a setting or cache that triggers this issue. I do not use CandyBar myself ... somebody earlier in this thread said they thought CandyBar was triggering the effect also. It was that previous post I was referring to when brining up CandyBar.

Also, FYI, I have these files sorted by title and era so that the most of these files in any one folder is about 600.

I also have thousands of jpg's with way more that 10,000 images in one folder ... and this situation NEVER triggers the blurred icons.  I can work in those packed folders all day and all the icons are fine, but start working on the comics files and POP.

just wanted to add, here in this 2 year old thread that I've visited and posted in quite often, that after upgrading to Lion that the old blurry/pixelated icon issue has once again popped up in Lion for myself .... though I have to admit that it happens much less frequently than it did in Snow ... as in less than 1/2 the amount than it did in SL .... still stinks none the less

though I hate my new problem that Lion introduced ... which is view options not sticking, but thats OT