Archive Utility freezes when trying to unzip a zip file

Open Activity Monitor in the Applications/Utilities folder. Search for appleeventsd select the process and press the big red Quit button, when it asks you select force quit. That's it. Try to open the zip file again.

Worked for me. Haven't verified if it prevents the issue from returning, but it did alleviate the issue at the time.

Tried BOTH repair disk perms AND delete pref file .. didnt work.

Putting my seasoned (read: old) developer hat on for a moment, the unarchiver shouldnt hang even IF permissions are wrong or the plist is broken. THis bug has been around since before Lion, Apple have shipped TWO major releases and several minor releases WITHOUT fixing this bug. I seem to recall another large software company that stopped fixing bugs in it's OS too ... wonder what happened to them?

Just go to terminal and run:

sudo killall -HUP appleeventsd

You don't even have to exit Archive, it will unfreeze and finish doing the unarchive as soon as you hit enter.

Repairing permissions + Restart did work perfectly. Thanks!

My Archive Utility was hanging everytime...

deleting the archiveutility.plist did not work

this terminal command worked for me:

$sudo killall -HUP appleeventsd

kind of amazing this has not been fixed by apple - any help with 10.8.3?

also - The Unarchiver.app works well

Same here,

Apple is turing into Microsoft one bug at a time. Same issue here, amongst many.

Deleting the plist for Archive Utility and repairing permissions on the Boot Drive, and restarting, worked for me.

Open a new Terminal window and type the following command:

sudo killall appleeventsd

- and voila! The "Utility" in "Archive Utility" has been returned. I myself am not versed in Unix/OSX command line operations - I found this solution on another site, so I'm not exactly sure how it works. However, it's been a success every time I've used it, and has proven helpful for other applications as well.

Occasionally, for example, I'll be listening to music, gaming, or watching a movie using headphones and all sound issuing from my MBP will cut out (it's an issue with Google Chrome in particular). I tried killing that same process (appleeventsd). Instant fix, no restart, or even wait time, necessary.

Hopefully this solved your problem! Although I would be interested in knowing just what the fix is/does.

Repairing permissions and restarting worked for me. (Not sure if only a restart would have done the trick.)

mattwillmarron: sudo killall appleeventsd worked for me! Thank you.

Pacifist was my temp workaround until I found your quick fix.