Finder unusably slow in a particular User Account
Greetings Earthlings!
Yesterday, I was streaming music through Grooveshark.com. The monitor had gone blank, which was normal for power saving. The issue began when I tried to wake it back up... The computer was completely unresponsive... No button press, trackpad gesture, or click gave a response, however the music continued playing. I ended up resorting to manual Shut Down by pressing and holding the physical Power Button.
Since restarting, the machine had become unusably slow, to the tune of taking 10-15 minutes to start up, and clicking on anything took 5-7 minutes to respond, if it responded at all. Since it sometimes was unclear if it had permanently hung or was just slow, I had many manual restarts, as above.
System Info:
MacBook Pro - 15 inch, Late 2011
Processor: 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7
Memory: 10 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 (8GB + 2GB)
Graphics: AMD Radeon HD 6750M 513 MB
OSX: 10.9.1 (Crash and burn, eh Mavericks?)
Spotlight Indexing has long been disabled.
Things I’ve learned and tried:
Activity Monitor (which ran incredibly slowly) eventually indicated that nothing was using an unusual amount of CPU or Memory
Ran Disk Utility to check for problems, it reported no errors with the Hard Drive
Verified permissions… It returned some problems with Ibooks, which I never use and is not in the Login Items
Ran Apple Hardware Test, it reported no errors
Removed user and system caches, problem persists
Safe Boot - problem persists
Created new account, problem not occurring… Aha! It’s most likely a problem with the original User Account.
Created root user to access and delete files from offending User Account
deleted ‘com.apple.finder.plist’, problem seemed slightly better, but that was an illusion, and it is, in fact, still very slow.
So, that’s where I am at now… I’ve looked up so many threads and tried many things, many of which take a very long time since just logging into that offending User Account takes a long time, and doing anything in it, including logging out or shutting down takes a very long time.
Any help will be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Mark