Finder eating 100% of CPU

[andymac2210]

Finder is at about 100% of CPU usage right now.

This happens ONLY when I view folders in icon view and there's many different folders or app icons on the screen.

First screenshot is with normal CPU usage with the applications folder opne, notice the window isn't showing all the icons.

The second image is when the CPU is using 100%, nothing else changed.


http://i.imgur.com/wIZDD.jpg

What's strange is that when I log into my other account on the same computer it doesn't eat CPU time with the same apps open and finder window showing all icons.

This doesn't happen with list view, nor is it set to calculate folder size.

Can anyone help?

 

[east85]

I can't help but I will say that this exact same thing happened to me earlier tonight. I ended up killing finder to solve the issue, at least for now. I don't know what it was, icon view, or what, but finder definitely did spike my CPU to 100% on Activity Monitor with Lion. I'm running 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo on a Macbook Aluminum Unibody, just throwing that out there.

 

[stomer]

Try killing Dropbox. It was the #1 cause of Finder crashes for me.

Dropbox injects some of its code into Finder so that the icon overlays display. I found that that code isn’t particular reliable, nor helpful.

 

[andymac2210]

Try killing Dropbox. It was the #1 cause of Finder crashes for me.

Dropbox injects some of its code into Finder so that the icon overlays display. I found that that code isn’t particular reliable, nor helpful.

Genius!

That seemed to work.
I now feel silly for not realising this was the problem, since that is the only difference between my account and the other user accounts on this computer in terms of startup programs!

Thank you.

 

[stomer]

Glad to help. You’re welcome.

I’ll point out one more thing that I did to take care of any Dropbox/Finder issues permanently. Dropbox updates itself silently and I never ever want it to update silently to a version where the Dropbox Finder plugin causes Finder to go berserk. So I created a rule in Hazel that monitors Dropbox’s Resource folder. If Hazel finds a file called DropboxHelperInstaller then it deletes it.

So even if Dropbox updates itself silently, it never gets the chance to install the “Helper”.