Finder and Open&Save Dialogs Hanging/Freezing after Catalina Update
A few weeks back I decided to update my 2012 Macbook Pro from High Sierra to Catalina (10.15.4). Since then I've come to regret this decision beyond belief. It has become nearly IMPOSSIBLE to use my MBP for work due to the CONSTANT freezing/hanging whenever I open Finder and try to browse through folders. The problem also appears to happen anytime I try to Open or Save a file... regardless of the program I'm using. When this happens, the hanging file/process starts eating up resources and entire system comes to a halt. The only way to get things back to normal is to Relaunch Finder or through activity monitor locate the program that i was using to open or save with and locate the following process below it...
"com.apple.appkit.xpc.openAndSavePanelService (**PROGRAM NAME DISPLAYED HERE**). The "Recent Hangs" count continues to go up until I Force Quit. The problem persists unless I wait about 5-10min and SOMETIMES Hanging is cleared up or I'll have to Force quit about 7-8 or more times and finally I'm able to open/save or browse files.
See screenshot below.
I've done quite a bit of diagnosis myself and have tried the following (and probably more that I can't recall) most to no avail.
SYSTEM:
Mid-2012 Macbook Pro 13"
2.5 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5
OS: Catalina (10.15.7)
Ram: 16GB
Attempted Fixes:
- Delete Finder plist and restart
- Run FirstAid on disk drive
- Disable Icloud Drive (no other cloud storage or backup enabled)
- Ensure enough free space on drive (More than 350GB available on drive with OS)
- Ram has been maxed out at 16GB
- Disabled all extra items, local & network drives/folders/devices from showing up in Finder's Sidebar
- Ensure Spotlight is not currently Indexing
- Clean/Delete all cache files
- Tried reinstalling the update to catalina (10.15.4)
- Installed latest Catalina update (10.15.7)
- Reset NVRAM & PRAM
- Reset SMC
The ONLY thing that actually worked was creating a new user and switching users. Like magic the problem disappeared. Leads me to conclude the issue is definitely (most likely) within my current users settings/permissions or something along those lines but I can't seem to get a bearing on what it could be. I was hoping someone could at least point me in the right directly. I'll also include a Sampling of the process "com.apple.appkit.xpc.openAndSavePanelService" during one of the events in question. Maybe that can help.
I hope the info provided was enough but if there's anything else anyone may require please don't hesitate to ask.
I'm open to most reasonable suggestions/solutions but I REALLY wanna avoid having to migrate everything over to a new user... Hopefully it won't come to that if someone can find a solution.
Thanks in advance!
-Harry
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.15