Hello Everyone, I've got a desktop that refreshes every 5 seconds after a popup of a FinderInjectionTool in my Force Quit Applications. Has Anyone Seen this before. It is only my desktop and finder that resets and it's not google drive or dropbox because they are both off. I am running 10.6.8.
I suspect it is one of those 2, but...
Bootup holding CMD+r, or the Option/alt key to boot from the Restore partition & use Disk Utility from there to Repair the Disk, then Repair Permissions, restart.
Then...
Open Console in Utilities & see if there are any clues or repeating messages when this happens.
Also...
One way to test is to Safe Boot from the HD, (holding Shift key down at bootup), run Disk Utility in Applications>Utilities, then highlight your drive, click on Repair Permissions, Test for problem in Safe Mode...
PS. Safe boot may stay on the gray radian for a long time, let it go, it's trying to repair the Hard Drive
Reboot, test again.
If it only does it in Regular Boot, then it could be some hardware problem like Video card, (Quartz is turned off in Safe Mode), or Airport, or some USB or Firewire device, or 3rd party add-on, Check System Preferences>Accounts (Users & Groups in later OSX versions)>Login Items window to see if it or something relevant is listed. Or an errant process eating up RAM.
Check the System Preferences>Other Row, for 3rd party Pref Panes.
Also look in these if they exist, some are invisible...
/private/var/run/StartupItems
/Library/StartupItems
/System/Library/StartupItems
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons
/Library/LaunchDaemons
I encountered this problem, and after a bit of sleuthing I discovered what probably caused it on my MacBook (13-inch, Aluminum, Late 2008) and how to correct the problem . . .
The key bit of information was a post about this occurring after someone installed Citrix software . . .
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4778300?tstart=0
Citrix software already was on the MacBook, which I am repairing, and since I never heard of it, I clicked on its Preference Pane in Mac OS X 10.7.5 (Lion) System Preferences, which then caused the Citrix Preference Pane window to appear, at which time the purpose of the software appears to involve some type of file transferring . . .
Around the same time, I downloaded and tried to install the free trial version of Drive Genius 4 (ProSoft), which would not install, since it needs a higher version of Mac OS X than Lion . . .
I also did a Safe Boot via rebooting when the SHIFT key is depressed, which I did based on something I read in yet another post about a SAFE BOOT doing a bit of disk repairing . . .
And based on another post I found, I did the "sudo find / -name ".DS_Store" -depth -exec rm {} \;" command in Terminal, but minus the outer quotation marks. This did something and ran for about 10 to 16 minutes, but after rebooting the problem with Finder continued . . .
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3193215?start=0&tstart=0
Yet another thing I noticed is that when I tried to do a Restart via the Apple main menu, the "FinderInjectionTool" prevented it, as it did when I tried to do a Shutdown, so instead I just held-down the MacBook power button until the MacBook shutdown, and then I started it in SAFE MODE, at which time I removed the two applications, one of which definitely was the culprit . . .
I am reasonably comfortable that this problem in the scenario I described was caused either (a) by running the Citrix software or (b) by downloading and trying to install Drive Genius 4, where with respect to the latter, I downloaded it from the ProSoft website, not from a third-party website . . .
WHAT I KNOW
(1) Booting in Safe Mode makes it possible to fix a few things . . .
(2) Removing the Citrix software preference pane from System Preferences and deleting the Citrix Preference Pane application from the "Applications" folder was productive . . .
(3) Moving the Drive Genius 4 download from the Mac OS X Desktop to the Trash can was productive . . .
(4) Running the "sudo find / -name ".DS_Store" -depth -exec rm {} \;" command in Terminal did not appear to do anything useful, but it did no harm as far as I can determine . . .
SUMMARY
I think this qualifies as a malware attack, so it's the first one I have encountered on the Mac since the year 2000 when I got my first Mac . . .
Whether this qualifies as being "hacked" is another matter, but so what . . .
I think it qualifies . . .
It took about two hours of research via Google and doing some experiments based on a combination of (a) information found in various posts and (b) what I know about the Mac . . .
The problem is fixed, which is fabulous!
Fabulous! 🙂
P. S. In some respects, I am a bit of an idiot for clicking on stuff without having any idea what it does or might do, but (a) I cloned the MacBook hard drive with SuperDuper! (Shirt Pocket) yesterday, which was before I wandered into experimenting today, and (b) I plan to replace the current MacBook hard drive with a new hard drive or perhaps a SSD drive, so I had a verified recovery plan in place before I started doing today's experiments, hence it's all good, and now I can get the coveted, "I have a Mac and I've been hacked!" tattoo on my
my naughty bits, so to speak . . . 😝
Desktop/Finder keeps resetting - FinderInjectionTool
