Need to Relaunch Lion Finder after Booting up

An extremely annoying problem after a couple of years! Finder would not work after booting Lion until I relaunched Finder. Most of the solutions that helped others did nothing for me. I finally solved the problem by doing two things:

1. I booted to safe mode and played around, as suggested here:

http://www.brandonmartinez.com/2011/11/26/resolve-a-frozen-finder-in-os-x-lion/

2. I went into Preferences, Mission Control, and unchecked the box for "Show Dashboard as space," on a hunch that Finder did not know how to handle the Dashboard as a space because, frankly, the Dashboard does not look or function anything like a Desktop.

After years of dealing with this problem, I'm too annoyed to go back and see whether 1 or 2 alone would have done the trick. All I can say is that 1 and 2 together did the trick for me.