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?
iMac Pro, macOS High Sierra (10.13.3), null