Open/Save Dialog Beachball

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Open/Save Dialog Beachball

I'm a software developer provisioning a new iMac Pro. I'm just about finished setting up a new user account, and experiencing an extraordinarily frustrating issue. Every time an application -- any application -- opens a file open/save dialog, the system hangs with a beachball for 10-15 seconds. Sometimes, the dialog opens with the sidebar empty (the area where you see favorites, mounted volumes, etc) and then populates after a few seconds. This hang is so bad that it's actually caused Safari to crash a few times. I'm also seeing the beachball in the Finder and other places, but the most noticeable is in the open/save dialog.

I've tried just about everything I can imagine, including

- Rebooting

- Disconnecting all perhiperals

- Disabling SIP and SecureBoot

- Disabling Daemons and background processes

- Disabling non-Apple kexts

- Pulling out clumps of my hair

As a last resort, I created a new user account. This resolves the issue entirely. Given that I just spent the past week setting up this account however, I'd rather not do it again. Can anyone help me think of what might be specific to this user account affecting the open/save dialog?

Troubleshooting Mac hangs used to be possible by hunting for errors in Console. Unfortunately Console now seems to be all but indecipherable to anyone except Apple's own developers. I've been keeping a close eye on Activity Monitor and top and I don't see anything hogging resources, except for an occasional spike in kernel_task.

Here's the log from the Safari crash, and my EtreCheck summary. It looks like Safari crashed trying to load com.apple.LSSharedFileList.FavoriteVolumes, so it seems the hang has to do with the sidebar. How can I troubleshoot this?

https://pastebin.com/raw/3kpfddji

https://pastebin.com/raw/73v4js7r

iMac Pro, macOS High Sierra (10.13.3), null

Posted on Mar 14, 2018 6:11 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

prohtex2 Author

Level 1

10 points

Mar 15, 2018 5:08 AM in response to prohtex2

In case anyone else is experiencing this issue, it is caused by setting LSSharedFileList defaults which control Recent Items (for example "defaults write com.apple.Preview.LSSharedFileList" etc). These commands worked fine in Sierra; in High Sierra, apparently, they create this sidebar hang issue. It took me 40 hours of troubleshooting to run this down. If you set any defaults for a particular application, this nightmare can be cured by running "defaults delete <com.vendor.app>.LSSharedFileList" (where <com.vendor.app> is your app).

I'd post an update to other threads where these commands are explained, but Apple has crippled the discussions forums. For example: Clear recent items in Lion. DON'T do this in High Sierra!

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Answer 2

dialabrain

Level 10

122,519 points

Mar 15, 2018 5:35 AM in response to prohtex2

prohtex2 wrote:

These commands worked fine in Sierra; in High Sierra, apparently, they create this sidebar hang issue. It took me 40 hours of troubleshooting to run this down. If you set any defaults for a particular application, this nightmare can be cured by running "defaults delete <com.vendor.app>.LSSharedFileList" (where <com.vendor.app> is your app).

FWIW, that's because LSSharedFileList files for individual applications no longer exist in High Sierra. A great example of why one shouldn't try to modify the OS other than using the built in settings.

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