Repair Hard Disk via Single User Mode

HI, I've been having problems with my finder crashing so I tried reseting permissions in my home folder based on this to hopefully fix it:

http://www.everythingmacintosh.com/tech-notes/repair-your-hard-disk-in-single-us er-mode/

I'm pretty new to this process, but It seems to be running through all the files on my system (and has been doing so for the last half hour) – is this normal? and how long would this process typically take?

This was in reference to this thread I started earlier:

https://discussions.apple.com/activity?streamSource=connections&streamID=6913666

Any help would be greatly appreciated!