Finder Not Working

Might be a corrupt .plist.

Do a backup, preferably 2 backups on 2 separate drives.

Go to Finder and select your user/home folder. With that Finder window as the front window, either select Finder/View/Show View options or go command - J. When the View options opens, check ’Show Library Folder’. That should make your user library folder visible in your user/home folder. Select Library. Then go to Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist. Move the .plist to your desktop.

Re-launch Finder by restarting the computer and test. If it works okay, delete the plist from the desktop.

If the same, return the .plist to where you got it from, overwriting the newer one.

Thanks to leonie for some information contained in this.

The original post is a few months old but not clear if this was resolved. Just had the same issue on MacOS 10.9.5 and spent lots of time trying to figure it out, so posting this response if it helps anyone else out.

Finally found it is a Google Drive problem with Mavericks - advice elsewhere is to either remove Google Drive or disable in Google Drive preferences the option "Show file sync status icons". Force Finder to relaunch or restart machine and should be fixed.

A pretty nasty bug that still seems to remain in Google Drive - not sure if only affects Mavericks or other MacOS versions.

Good find!

I was able to help a few users that I thought were having other graphics glitches and finder issues unrelated to this.

Maybe you should post your solution here, in the Mavericks forums, as a brand new posting so others can find this more easliy.

No one is going to really see your solution buried here inside another posting.

carramar30 wrote:

Finally found it is a Google Drive problem with Mavericks - advice elsewhere is to either remove Google Drive or disable in Google Drive preferences the option "Show file sync status icons". Force Finder to relaunch or restart machine and should be fixed.

A pretty nasty bug that still seems to remain in Google Drive - not sure if only affects Mavericks or other MacOS versions.

Thanks for that - I've had two or three minor occurences of this sort of thing apparently empty folders, or on one occasion part of an on-screen clock. I've modified the prefs as you suggest.

Roger

After some frustrating searching, this is what led me to fix my problem ... and this is a few years old, but the symptom suddenly appeared yesterday ... and I have used Google Drive for years .... maybe they suddenly accidentally reintroduced the same bug ?

https://www.maketecheasier.com/fix-google-drive-crashing-finder-in-mavericks/

Chris.

Thank you so much!!

Spent the morning trying to troubleshoot this bug, Running 10.9.5 - my finder wouldn't open folders, screen redraws were all pixelated, went through hours of system resets.

Almost was ready to give up and do full system reinstall which would have been a major headache and downtime at work.

Turning off Google Drive solved all problems.

Thank you so much carramar30 !

The same problem appeared last thursday. Your solution works on my imac running 10.9.5. I simply disabled the icons option on Google Drive, restarted the imac and everything is fine now.

I posted a link to your post on a french forum: http://forums.macg.co/threads/problemes-de-fonctionnement-du-finder.1283820/

Laurent

Carramar30 - Thank you! Your solution fixed my Finder!

Right on! Thanks for the very helpful post. Finder good again.

Thank you for posting. Works to me. 🙂

Thank you very much, your solution worked. Cheers, Halo

Maybe off topic, but if I backed up my external HD before learning how to remedy the problem, would this Google Drive bug also have been copied onto the external HD?

Probably, but you would then apply the fix posted above if you reinstalled.

Thanks, thanks, thanks. I've had this problem for months! You've made my computer 50% more usable.