There are posts going back to 2008 of desktop icons freezing. I have a brand new - out of the box - Air and a brand new install of Catalina - and guess what, desk top icons have just frozen after 2 days of use.
I expect Apple boffins to be all over this as it is a serious product/software flaw. Anybody tell me why its happening and this 11 year old problem is still around?
MacBook
Boot into Safe Mode (Use Safe Mode to isoloate issues with your Mac) and test the desktop icons from there. Any improvement? Reboot normally and test again.
NOTE: Safe Mode boot can take up to 10 minutes as it's doing some system cache cleaning, volume verifying and directory repairing.
Graham369 wrote:
Thanks but that's not what I got - a new item added to the desktop - like a JPG or PDF - opens for a few minutes and then becomes frozen like all the other icons. You can open them from Finder - just not open or drag them around.
However, I just right-clicked and hit 'clean up' on one icon and they became active again... at least for now...
Boot into Recovery (Command R) and from the dropdown menu: Utilities> Disk Utility> run the First Aid on your Macintosh-Data. If errors are found and repaired, run again until no errors reported.
Recovery: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904
Thanks but that's not what I got - a new item added to the desktop - like a JPG or PDF - opens for a few minutes and then becomes frozen like all the other icons. You can open them from Finder - just not open or drag them around.
However, I just right-clicked and hit 'clean up' on one icon and they became active again... at least for now...
Is this the problem clicking on an item in Launcher where the icon will appear on the screen and you can't move, click on, or remove the icon? That was an intermittent problem and was impossible to replicate. I believe that this may be related to the problem with moving apps between screens on iOS. Do not lose hope. I am seeing signs of progress on bug fixes from Apple.
Desktop Icons do not respond
