Finder crashes when clicking on Applications folder

VERY weird. Beginning a few days ago the finder on my Mac Pro crashes whenever I clicked on the Applications folder. It makes no difference what finder view I am using (icons, columns, etc.). Even if I click on the alias to the Applications folder in the sidebar, the finder crashes. I cannot view the contents of that folder by any method. The only way I can get to an item contained therein is to search for it using Spotlight.

Thinking that maybe my startup disk was hosed somehow, I ran Disk Utility (repaired permissions and verified the disk) and ran all tests within TechTool Deluxe. Both said the disk and filesystem were fine.

I tried copying the entire folder to another disk, but the copy aborts after the first few items (stops with Adobe Photoshop; the next item alphabetically is Aperture, I think). The error message I get says "The operation could not be completed because an item is being modified." In case Aperture was somehow a problem, I removed it (searched using Spotlight and then dragged it to the trash). No change in behavior.

I used Carbon Copy Cloner to replicate the entire drive to another, newly reformatted drive and made that drive the startup disk. No change in behavior.

It sure seems that the issue has to do with some kind of file corruption (that CCC dutifully replicated) rather than a faulty drive, but I have no idea where to look next for a solution (other than reformatting and reinstalling over 100 applications from scratch; ugh).

Does anyone have any idea what may be going on here? Until I can fix this, the Mac Pro is pretty much useless (luckily, I also have a MacBook Pro).

Follow-up:

Upon further investigation I determined that the next item alphabetically after Photoshop in the Applications folder was Adobe Reader, not Aperture. So I searched for Adobe Reader using Spotlight and deleted it. Now the Pro will not even start. I attached an external USB boot drive in order to get the system back up. Once booted, it shows that my previous startup drive was "not recognized" and requires re-formatting. The saga continues....

Kisuke2:

I'm embarrassed to say that although I have owned more than 15 Macs since the first 128K machine in 1984, I have never used safe mode. I don't even know how; I'll investigate. I haven't tried a new user account, but will; that's easy. Neither have I tried trashing the ~/library/preferences/com.apple.finder.plist. Since the latter is the easiest to do and sounds pretty logical, I'll do that first and report back.

I appreciate your reply.

Removed the plist file; no change.

I just bought a 1.5 Tb disk to replace my hosed 250 Gb startup disk (was running out of space on the latter anyway). I'm going to install that, install Snow Leopard from scratch onto it and copy all the files except the Applications folder over from the 250 Gb drive. Then I'll copy all the Applications folder and its contents over from my MacBook Pro (via Gb Ethernet).

I'm certainly hoping that that will solve the problems. I'll post the results once I'm finished.