Finder windows won't open properly after installing OS X Lion

I am also having this same problem. I'm not sure whether it has something to with the way spaces was set up before the upgrade? It's very frustrating.

I think it's definately something to do with how spaces was set up before installation. I had 4 spaces, with an application and finder installed to each space. After installing Lion, I'm having a hard time with each desktop, my applciations will switch from desktop to desktop sporatically

I am having the same problem. I also had 4 spaces before installing Lion. I haven't found a fix yet. I guess we will have to wait for 10.7.x update.

Best regards

Same here and I had 4 spaces going to before upgrade. Someone tell apple please. : )

I am having exactly the same problem. I too, used to have 4 spaces. I have 4 accounts set up on this i-Mac. I was the only account using these 4 spaces and I am the only one having problems starting the finder. Is there a solution for this?

In another thread I found a solution that worked for me! Just Force quit Finder and then restart Finder.

I have to add that I used to use Dropbox and there seems to be an issue whith Dropbox and OSX Lion. Before force quiting Finder I had already removed Dropbox and followed the instructions from the Dropbox forum to remove some insertion code from Dropbox with respect to Finder. Maybe it is the combination of actions that did the trick ...

Have you tried to log-out, log-in again and then check if the problem reappears? If it doesn't reappear, then I guess the solution wroks and I will give it a try.

Unfortunately, after logout / login the problem is back :-(

Force quiting and restarting Finder is the only way I can get the Finder to open at this moment.

I'm not happy with that.

I guess, we will have to wait for the next Lion update! It might be a matter of a couple of weeks (I hope they fix this problem). At any rate, force quitting Finder and restarting it is much better than what I used to do. I used to restart using the disk unitility and even that didn't always work.

I am also thinking if the problem is confined to those of us who had multiple spaces before installing and if, in the unfourtunate event that Apple doesn't fix the problem, I will have to restore my SnowLeopard from a backup, reduce to a single space and reinstall Lion! I know, it will be such a pain, but it might be the only way out.

Best regards,

Nabil

I think that I figured this out. I too had this problem and I was using 9 spaces. I found that the finder view was set up properly after upgrading to Lion. In order to fix this do the following:

Conrol click on the finder icon. You will find an options tab. Assign to "all desktops" and this should fix the problem.

Here a picture showing how to set the assignment.

Dear Lewis,

I should mention that after installing the 1st Lion update, the problem disapeared. However, a couple of days ago, I ran the diskutilites to verify and repair the harddrive from the Lion Recovery screen (pressing Command-R while rebooting), and volla! The problem reapeared, but I was able to get raid of it by running the same disk verfication and repair one more time. When I tried your suggestion once, the problem reapeared. So, I reassigned the finder to This Desktop and it worked again. Later I tried none and it worked and it also worked with All Desktop this time. Keep in mind the assignment of Finder to none, This Desktop and All Desktop has different effects on where clicked folders are opened. For every change I make, I loggout and re-loggin to decide whether the appreas exists. I am just wondering if your suggested would have worked had I hadn't installed the 1st Lion update! Perhaps someone who hasn't installed the 1st Lion update yet can try it out and let us know.

Anyway, I appreciate your suggestion.

Nabil

Working for me too so far. Besides, I LIKE Finder windows to be accessible in all spaces (er, desktops).

Setting the Finder option to be assigned to all desktops doesn't help in my case. I still have to force quit the finder to be able to use it.

If you are still having problems with the Finder in Lion, you might try the suggestions here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4780763